AN LBP-BASED MULTI-SCALE ILLUMINATION PREPROCESSING METHOD FOR FACE RECOGNITION

It is one of the major challenges for face recognition to minimize the disadvantage of il- lumination variations of face images in different scenarios. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) has been proved to be successful for face recognition. However, it is still very rare to take LBP as an illumination preprocessing approach. In this paper, we propose a new LBP-based multi-scale illumination pre- processing method. This method mainly includes three aspects: threshold adjustment, multi-scale addition and symmetry restoration/neighborhood replacement. Our experiment results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing LBP-based methods at the point of illumination preprocessing. Moreover, compared with some face image preprocessing methods, such as histogram equalization, Gamma transformation, Retinex, and simplified LBP operator, our method can effectively improve the robustness for face recognition against illumination variation, and achieve higher recog- nition rate.