Face recognition in the presence of multiple illumination sources

Most existing face recognition algorithms work well for controlled images but are quite susceptible to changes in illumination and pose. This has led to the rise of analysis-by-synthesis approaches due to their inherent potential to handle these external factors. Though these approaches work quite well, most of them assume that the face is illuminated by a single light source which is usually not true in realistic conditions. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to recognize faces illuminated by arbitrarily placed, multiple light sources. The algorithm does not need to know the number of light sources and works extremely well even while recognizing faces illuminated by different number of light sources. Results using this algorithm are reported on multiple-illumination datasets generated from PIE by T. Sim, et al. (2003) and Yale Face Database B by W. Zhao, et al. (2003). We also highlight the importance of the hard non-linearity in the Lambert´s law which is often ignored, probably to linearize the estimation process