Diffusion filtering for illumination invariant face recognition illumination approximation with diffusion filters within retinex context

Face recognition becomes a very important technology in recent years for a lot of various applications. One major problem of the most state-of-the-art algorithms are different lightning conditions which can decrease recognition rates dramatically. To reduce the influence of illumination in the recognition process normalization methods can be used. In this paper we introduce illumination normalization algorithms based on diffusion filters. Further we compare our approaches with selected established algorithms. Finally we present our evaluation results based on well known face recognitions techniques and an appropriate face database. The results show that the diffusion filter approaches outperforms all other algorithms which demonstrates the capabilities of the diffusion filter technology for illumination normalization in face recognition.