Determining illumination sources in frontal face images using salient samples from a face depth map

An efficient method is presented for determining multiple light sources illuminating faces using a general face depth map for comparable image generation. A 3D face depth map is artificially illuminated by known sources from several known directions and a set of samples from each resulting image is collected. These and corresponding samples from probed face image are used to find the light source vectors that generates an artificial face image whose samples are illuminated optimally similar to the probed face. Since the artificial data are pre-calculated and stored, illumination calculation is quite fast for a given frontal face image.