Adaptive Region-Based Image Enhancement Method for Robust Face Recognition Under Variable Illumination Conditions

Variable illumination conditions, especially the side lighting effects in face images, form a main obstacle in face recognition systems. To deal with this problem, this paper presents a novel adaptive region-based image preprocessing scheme that enhances face images and facilitates the illumination invariant face recognition task. The proposed method first segments an image into different regions according to its different local illumination conditions, then both the contrast and the edges are enhanced regionally so as to alleviate the side lighting effect. Different from existing contrast enhancement methods, we apply the proposed adaptive region-based histogram equalization on the low-frequency coefficients to minimize illumination variations under different lighting conditions. Besides contrast enhancement, by observing that under poor illuminations the high-frequency features become more important in recognition, we propose enlarging the high-frequency coefficients to make face images more distinguishable. This procedure is called edge enhancement (EdgeE). The EdgeE is also region-based. Compared with existing image preprocessing methods, our method is shown to be more suitable for dealing with uneven illuminations in face images. Experimental results on the representative databases, the Yale B+Extended Yale B database and the Carnegie Mellon University-Pose, Illumination, and Expression database, show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of face images with illumination variations. The proposed method does not require any modeling and model fitting steps and can be implemented easily. Moreover, it can be applied directly to any single image without using any lighting assumption, and any prior information on 3-D face geometry.