OptiFuzz: a robust illumination invariant face recognition system and its implementation

Vision-based human face detection and recognition are widely used and have been shown to be effective in normal illumination conditions. Under severe illumination conditions, however, it is very challenging. In this paper, we address the effect of illumination on the face detection and the face recognition problem by introducing a novel illumination invariant method, called OptiFuzz. It is an optimized fuzzy-based illumination invariant method to solve the effect of illumination for photometric-based human face recognition. The rule of the Fuzzy Inference System is optimized by using a genetic algorithm. The Fuzzy’s output controls an illumination invariant model that is extended from Land’s reflectance model. We test our method by using Yale B Extended and CAS-PEAL face databases to represent the offline experiments, and several videos are recorded at our campus to represent the online indoor and outdoor experiments. Viola–Jones face detector and mutual subspace method are employed to handle the online face detection and face recognition experiments. Based on the experimental results, we can show that our algorithm outperforms the existing and the state-of-the-art methods in recognizing a specific person under variable lighting conditions with a significantly improved computation time. Other than that, using illumination invariant images is also effective in improving the face detection performance.