Improvement of Face Recognition with Gabor, PCA, and SVM Under Complex Illumination Conditions

Complex illumination condition is one of the most critical challenging problems for practical face recognition. However, numerous studies have had no effective solutions reported for full illumination variation of face images in the facial recognition research field. In order to effectively solve full illumination variation problem, we propose a novel approach for illumination normalization for facial images based on the enhanced contrast method of histogram equalization (HE) and fusion of illumination estimations (FOIE). Then, feature extraction is applied with consideration of both Gabor wavelet and principal component analysis methods to process illumination normalization. Next, a support vector machine classifier (SVM) is used for face classification. Experimental results show that superior performance can be obtained in the developed approach by comparisons with some state-of-the-arts.