Face recognition in the presence of expression and/or illumination variation

Face recognition is a technically difficult task that forms part of an ever-growing number of applications. The challenge becomes more complex by requirement of robustness against variation in facial expressions, pose and lighting condition. In this paper, we present a wavelet-based face recognition scheme and report on its performance on 2 databases. We shall also demonstrate that it is more robust against varying facial expressions than a known scheme that has been developed specifically for that purpose. We shall also report on the positive effect of a simple procedure to reduce the effect of variation in illumination level on accuracy, in contrast to histogram equalization.