Face recognition under large illumination variations using homomorphic filtering in spatial domain

•This paper combines homomorphic filter and local face representation methods.•We reduce illumination effects using homomorphic filtering in spatial domain.•A simple kernel for homomorphic filter is proposed.•Proposed method shown a highly robustness to large illumination variation.

This paper proposes a homomorphic filtering in spatial domain for reducing of illumination effects in face recognition systems. Also, in this research a simple kernel of homomorphic filter is proposed. Application of this method causes considerable reduction in computational time in the preprocessing step. When a new face image with an arbitrary illumination is given, the homomorphic filter is applied and its reflectance component is extracted. Then the reflectance component is divided into several local regions and histograms of each local region are extracted using multi-resolution uniform local Gabor binary patterns (MULGBP). These histograms are combined for obtaining the overall histogram of the images. Finally, for face recognition, a simple histogram matching process is performed between new face image histogram and the gallery images histogram. The results show that the proposed method is robust for large illumination variation with a reasonable computational complexity.