Automatic frequency band selection for illumination robust face recognition

Varying illumination conditions cause a dramatic change in facial appearance that leads to a significant drop in face recognition algorithms' performance. In this paper, to overcome this problem, we utilize an automatic frequency band selection scheme. The proposed approach is incorporated to a local appearance-based face recognition algorithm, which employs discrete cosine transform (DCT) for processing local facial regions. From the extracted DCT coefficients, the approach determines to the ones that should be used for classification. Extensive experiments conducted on the Yale face database B and the extended Yale face database B have shown that benefiting from frequency information provides robust face recognition under changing illumination conditions.