ILLUMINATION INVARIANT FACE RECOGNITION IN QUATERNION DOMAIN

Abstract

The performance of face recognition systems tends to decrease when images are affected by illumination. Feature extraction is one of the main steps of a face recognition process, where it is possible to alleviate the illumination effects on face images. In order to increase the accuracy of recognition tasks, different methods for obtaining illumination invariant features have been developed. The aim of this work is to compare two different ways to represent face image descriptions in terms of their illumination invariant properties for face recognition. The first representation is constructed following the structure of complex numbers and the second one is based on quaternion numbers. Using four different face description approaches both representations are constructed, transformed into frequency domain and expressed in polar coordinates. The most illumination invariant component of each frequency domain representation is determined and used as the representative information of the face image. Verification and identification experiments are then performed in order to compare the discriminative power of the selected components. Representative component of the quaternion representation overcame the complex one.