Illumination Invariant Face Recognition Using Nonlocal Total Variation in Logarithmic Domain

This paper presents a new illumination normalization method for robust face recognition under varying lighting conditions. In the proposed method, the illumination component is estimated by applying nonlocal total variation model in the logarithmic domain, and then the reflectance component is obtained based on reflectance model. The proposed method restrains the halo effect effectively while preserves the adequate texture information on the reflectance images. As an illumination invariant facial features, the reflectance images are directly utilized for face recognition. Experimental results on Yale face database B and CMU PIE database show that the performance of proposed method is robust and reliable in illumination invariant face recognition.