Fuzzy reasoning model to improve face illumination invariance

Enhancing facial images captured under different lighting conditions is an important challenge and a crucial component in the automatic face recognition systems. This work tackles illumination variation challenge by proposing a new face image enhancement approach based on Fuzzy theory. The proposed Fuzzy reasoning model generates an adaptive enhancement which corrects and improves non-uniform illumination and low contrasts. The FRM approach has been assessed using four blind-reference image quality metrics supported by visual assessment. A comparison to six state-of-the-art methods has also been provided. Experiments are performed on four public data sets, namely Extended Yale-B, Mobio, FERET and Carnegie Mellon University Pose, Illumination, and Expression, showing very interesting results achieved by our approach.