Robust albedo estimation from face image under unknown illumination

Xuan Zou; Josef Kittler; Miroslav Hamouz; Jose R. Tena

doi:10.1117/12.778599

17 March 2008 Robust albedo estimation from face image under unknown illumination

Xuan Zou, Josef Kittler, Miroslav Hamouz, Jose R. Tena

Proceedings Volume 6944, Biometric Technology for Human Identification V; 69440A (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.778599
Event: SPIE Defense and Security Symposium, 2008, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

Uncontrolled illumination poses severe problems for face recognition in practical application scenarios. Many techniques to deal with this problem rely on illumination modeling and face relighting. In this paper we propose a robust approach to face albedo estimation in the framework of illumination modeling with Spherical Harmonics. This technique requires only a single face image under arbitrary illumination and assumes the face shape is known. The recovered face albedo facilitates face rendering under new illumination conditions which is useful for both illumination invariant face recognition and computer animation. In the proposed approach, the consequences of the violation of the assumption of validity of the spherical harmonics model are mitigated by minimising a cost function involving robust forms of the error in both the spherical harmonics model and the smoothness constraint. The robust estimation provides significantly better results than the traditional Least Squares Estimation in the experiments on a 3D face database.

Citation Download Citation

Xuan Zou, Josef Kittler, Miroslav Hamouz, and Jose R. Tena "Robust albedo estimation from face image under unknown illumination", Proc. SPIE 6944, Biometric Technology for Human Identification V, 69440A (17 March 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.778599

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available