Face recognition is a significant area of pattern recognition and computer vision research. Illumination in face recognition is obvious yet challenging task in pattern matching. Recent researchers introduced machine learning algorithms to solve illumination problems in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The major challenge in machine learning is the lack of classification accuracy. Thus, the novel Optimized Neural Network Algorithm (ONNA) is used to solve the aforementioned drawback. First, we propose a novel Weight Transfer Ideal Filter (WTIF) which is employed for pre-processing to remove the dark spots and shadows in an image by normalizing low frequency and high frequency of illumination. Secondly, Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) is employed to perform efficient extraction of features based on image area representation. These features are given as input to ONNA which classifies the given input image under illumination. Thus we achieve the recognition of the face under various illumination conditions. Our approach is analyzed and compared with existing approaches such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF). ONNA is better in terms of high accuracy and low error rate.