Illumination robust face representation based on intrinsic geometrical information

The ability to recognize people is a key element for improving naturalistic human-robot and human-computer interaction systems. In this paper, we propose a binary non-subsampled contourlet transform (B-NSCT) based illumination robust face representation. Faces are transformed into multi-scale and multi-directional contour information where the intrinsic geometrical structures are used for characterising facial texture. Experiments on the Yale B and CMU PIE databases illustrate that B-NSCT is highly insensitive to illumination variation.