A hardware system for extracting canonical faces from exemplar images

In [7], we introduced an exemplar-based algorithm used to estimate the canonical face representation of a face and validated the approach using the CMU PIE face database. We defined the canonical face as equivalent to the reflectance of the face which is free of shadows and specular reflections. In this paper, we described a complete canonical face acquisition system by combining the software that was developed previously with a specialised image acquisition module. The compactness and portability of the overall system makes it ideal for use in a wide variety of applications where capturing high quality images which are free of shadows and specular reflections in a pervasive setting is the main concern.