Face recognition under varying lighting conditions using self quotient image

In this paper, we introduce the concept of self-quotient image (SQI) for robust face recognition under varying lighting conditions. It is based on the quotient image method (Amnon Shashua et al., 2001) (T. Riklin-Raviv et al., 1999) to achieve lighting invariance. However, the SQI has three advantages: (1) it needs only one face image for extraction of intrinsic lighting invariant property of a face while removing extrinsic factor corresponding to the lighting; (2) no alignment is needed; (3) it works in shadow regions. The theoretical analysis on conditions where the algorithm is applicable and a non-iterative filtering algorithm for computing SQI are presented. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for robust face recognition under varying lighting conditions.