An Illumination Quality Measure for Face Recognition

A method to determine whether face images are affected or not by lighting problems is proposed. The method is the result of combining the analysis of lighting effect on face regions with the analysis of special areas which have a weight on the decision. Good results were obtained classifying well and badly illuminated images. The proposed method was inserted on a face recognition framework in order to apply the preprocessing step only to those images affected by illumination variations. The good performance achieved on verification and identification experiments, confirm that it is better to apply the proposed methodology than to preprocess all images when the lighting conditions are variable.