Illumination problem

Abstract: We present a generative appearance-based method for recognizing human faces under variation in lighting and viewpoint. Our method exploits the fact that the set of images of an object in fixed pose, but under all possible illumination conditions, is a convex cone in the space of images. Using a small number of training images of each face taken with different lighting directions, the shape and albedo of the face can be reconstructed. In turn, this reconstruction serves as a generative model that can be used to render (or synthesize) images of the face under novel poses and illumination conditions. The pose space is then sampled and, for each pose, the corresponding illumination cone is approximated by a low-dimensional linear subspace whose basis vectors are estimated using the generative model. Our recognition algorithm assigns to a test image the identity of the closest approximated illumination cone. Test results show that the method performs almost without error, except on the most extreme lighting directions.

Abstract: The illumination variation problem is one of the well-known problems in face recognition in uncontrolled environment. In this paper an extensive and up-to-date survey of the existing techniques to address this problem is presented. This survey covers the passive techniques that attempt to solve the illumination problem by studying the visible light images in which face appearance has been altered by varying illumination, as well as the active techniques that aim to obtain images of face modalities invariant to environmental illumination.

Abstract: The "hidden-line problem" for computer-drawn polyhedra is the problem of determining which edges, or parts of edges, of a polyhedra are visible from a given vantage point. This is an important problem in computer graphics, and its fast solution is especially critical for on-line CRT display applications. The method presented here for solving this problem is believed to be faster than previously known methods. An edge classification scheme is described that eliminates at once most of the totally invisible edges. The remaining, potentially visible edges are then tested in paths, which eventually cover the whole polyhedra. These paths are synthesized in such a way as to minimize the number of calculations. Both the case of a cluster of polyhedra and the illumination problem in which a polyhedron is illuminated from a point source of light are treated as applications of the general algorithm. Several illustrative examples are included.

Abstract: The appearance of a face will vary drastically when the illumination changes. Variations in lighting conditions make face recognition an even more challenging and difficult task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to handle the illumination problem. Our method can restore a face image captured under arbitrary lighting conditions to one with frontal illumination by using a ratio-image between the face image and a reference face image, both of which are blurred by a Gaussian filter. An iterative algorithm is then used to update the reference image, which is reconstructed from the restored image by means of principal component analysis (PCA), in order to obtain a visually better restored image. Image processing techniques are also used to improve the quality of the restored image. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, restored images with frontal illumination are used for face recognition by means of PCA. Experimental results demonstrate that face recognition using our method can achieve a higher recognition rate based on the Yale B database and the Yale database. Our algorithm has several advantages over other previous algorithms: (1) it does not need to estimate the face surface normals and the light source directions, (2) it does not need many images captured under different lighting conditions for each person, nor a set of bootstrap images that includes many images with different illuminations, and (3) it does not need to detect accurate positions of some facial feature points or to warp the image for alignment, etc.

Abstract: It is well known that the effect of illumination is mainly on the large-scale features (low-frequency components) of a face image. In solving the illumination problem for face recognition, most (if not all) existing methods either only use extracted small-scale features while discard large-scale features, or perform normalization on the whole image. In the latter case, small-scale features may be distorted when the large-scale features are modified. In this paper, we argue that large-scale features of face image are important and contain useful information for face recognition as well as visual quality of normalized image. Moreover, this paper suggests that illumination normalization should mainly perform on large-scale features of face image rather than the whole face image. Along this line, a novel framework for face illumination normalization is proposed. In this framework, a single face image is first decomposed into large- and small- scale feature images using logarithmic total variation (LTV) model. After that, illumination normalization is performed on large-scale feature image while small-scale feature image is smoothed. Finally, a normalized face image is generated by combination of the normalized large-scale feature image and smoothed small-scale feature image. CMU PIE and (Extended) YaleB face databases with different illumination variations are used for evaluation and the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods.