Illumination invariant face recognition using dual-tree complex wavelet transform in logarithm domain

Guang Yi Chen – Tien D. Bui – Adam Krzyzak

   In this article, we develop a new algorithm for illumination invariant face recognition. We first transform the face images to the logarithm domain, which makes the dark regions brighter. We then use dual-tree complex wavelet transform to generate face images that are approximately invariant to illumination changes and use collaborative representation-based classifier to classify the unknown faces to one known class. We set the approximation sub-band and the highest two DTCWT coefficient sub-bands to zero values before the inverse DTCWT transform is performed. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method improves upon a few existing methods under both the noise-free and noisy environments for the Extended Yale Face Database B and the CMU-PIE face database.

Keywords: face recognition, invariant features, dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT), collaborative representation-based classifier (CRC)

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