Illumination robust face recognition using random projection and sparse representation

Under uneven illumination, the performances degrade significantly for some existing face recognition methods. It is a challenge for face recognition methods to work effectively under different illumination conditions. In this paper, an illumination robust face recognition method, based on random projection and sparse representation, is proposed. In the proposed method, face images are preliminary illumination normalized by gamma correction and difference of Gaussian filtering, and then several projection spaces are obtained by iterative random projection, followed by constructing an initial sample space using Fisher discrimination analysis. This scheme enriches the discrimination abilities of sample features and achieves the security and completeness for biometric template. Test samples are sparsely decomposed into each subspace, and based on statistical average residual, a modified sparse representation method is proposed to realize face recognition with higher stability and illumination robustness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides competitive performance with acceptable computational efficiency. Specifically, for the five subsets of Yale B database, our approach achieves 99.74% average recognition rate, which performs higher accuracy than that of comparative methods.