A method of illumination compensation for human face image based on quotient image

Illumination variation is one of the critical factors affecting face recognition rate. A novel approach for human face illumination compensation is presented in this paper. It constructs the nine-dimension face illumination subspace based on quotient image. In addition, with the aim to improve algorithm efficiency, a half-face illumination image is proposed and the low-dimension training set of the face image under different illumination conditions are obtained by means of PCA and wavelet transform. After processing, two different illumination compensation strategies are given: one is adding light, and the other is removing light. Based on the illumination compensation strategy, we implement the typical illumination sample image synthesis and the standard illumination sample image synthesis on a PCA feature subspace and a wavelet transform subspace, respectively, and the illumination compensation of the gray images and the color images are further realized. Experimental results based on the Yale Face Database B, the Extended Yale Face Database B and the CAS-PEAL Face Database indicate that execution time after compensation is approximately half the time and face recognition rate is improved by 20% compared with that of the original images. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.