An Improved Face Recognition based on Illumination

Normalization Techniques and Elastic Bunch Graph Matching

Edison Paria*; Rolando Cardenas*; Juan Gutierrez*; Jose Galdos"
National University of San Agustin - UNSA*, Catholic University San Pablo - UCSP", Arequipa - Peru
edisonparia@gmail.com; jecardenast200@gmail.com; jcgutierrezc@gmail.com; jose.galdos.chavez@ucsp.edu.pe

I. Introducction III. Integration method

Illumination Normalization is considered one of the most difficult tasks in several com-
putational processes where digital images and video sequences are analyzed. The badly
contrast images are due to the positions, occlusions or high illumination variation de-
gree of face images [4, 2]. The Illumination changes due to different light sources found
in arbitrary positions and at different intensities contributing to a significant variation
of images or videos [3].
It is why a method for image normalization is proposed, combining three different Illumi-
nation Normalization Techniques such as Logarithm Transform, Histogram Equalization
and Discrete Cosine Transform.
The illumination normalization process works combining techniques such as: Histogram
Equalization, Logarithm Transform and DCT. according to Eq. 2:
F (x, y) = c1 DC T + c2 Lg + c3 HE (2)
Where F (x, y) is the normalized image, DC T is the Discrete Cosine Transform, Lg is the
Logarithm Transform and HE is Histogram Equalization. According to the process in which
the lighting influencing, the constants c1, c2 y c3 vary in their values, for this case the
constants values are: c1 = 0.3, c2 = 0.2 y c3 = 0.5. In Fig. 5 the steps of the methodology
is shown.

To test the proposal, it uses Elastic Bunch Graph

Matching (EBGM) [5], which is based on the concept
that images of real faces have many nonlinear char-
acteristics that are not addressed by the methods
using a holistic approach such features as variations
in illumination, pose and expression. A set of Gabor
wavelet transformations applied in a landmark point
creates a dynamic link architecture that projects the Fig. 5: Illumination Normalization process flow. The merge process represents the Eq. 2
Fig. 1: Landmark Points to compose a graph in a face in an elastic mesh.
face

IV. Implementation
To reduce resources needed for the proposal, it uses the following implementation
II. Technical Background strategy: To test the improvements, it uses the EBGM implementation presented by Bolme
[1]. The face recognition pipeline with the proposal and EBGM can be appreciated in Fig. 6.
It is detailed the techniques used to develop the illumination normalization research:

A. Logarithm Transform, it assigns a nar-

row range of values (gray scale or color
space) of a wide range of input values. It
is useful if you need to expand the values
of dark pixel in an image while high values
are compressed [4].

s = c log(1 + 256 r) (1)

Where r is the input image, c is a constant Fig. 6: Proposal

Fig. 2: (a) Input image, (b) Gray scale image, (c)
value, s is the improved image. The con- Image transformed by Eq. 1 [4]
stant c value used in the logarithm trans-
form was 20.

B. Histogram equalization, the main idea V. Experiments

is distribute uniformly values of the his-
togram image, if the resulting histogram To carry out the tests in this article each database was divided into groups of three to
from an image tends to most of the values four images per subject, depending on the database and each group was used as training
are in the dark area of the histogram or while the rest is used as test data. The face databases used are ORL/ATT, Yale Faces
the white, the values will be modified in A and Georgia Dataset. We obtain 92.81% of accuracy with ORL/ATT, 98.53% with Yale
the range of [0, 255] [4]. Faces A and 78.93% with Georgia Dataset.
The resulting image of the equalization
process shows a uniformly histogram dis-
tributed along the entire range, resulting
a clear image than the original.
Fig. 3: On the left, an image with dark gray shades
and its histogram, on the right, the resulting image ATT YALE Georgia
Without changes 91.429% 97.937% 77.800%
With Pre-process 92.817% 98.532% 78.933%
C. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is es-
Proposals Results
pecially used in signal and image process-
ing. DCT expressed in a finite sequence
of points, values in terms of sums of co-
sine functions of different frequencies. In Fig. 7: Proposals results
image processing, the use of DCT helps
break down an image in frequency, where
the small high frequency components usu-
ally can be discarded.
The result of the DCT is a matrix of pos-
itive and negative coefficients, which rep- References
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Fig. 4: Sample processing of the DCT. The dark gray
multiplied by a constant value of 1.5, start- 2003.
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