Face Re-Lighting from a Single Image under Harsh Lighting Conditions

In this paper, we present a new method to change the illumination condition of a face image, with unknown face geometry and albedo information. This problem is particularly difficult when there is only one single image of the subject available and it was taken under a harsh lighting condition. Recent research demonstrates that the set of images of a convex Lambertian object obtained under a wide variety of lighting conditions can be approximated accurately by a low-dimensional linear subspace using spherical harmonic representation. However, the approximation error can be large under harsh lighting conditions [2] thus making it difficult to recover albedo information. In order to address this problem, we propose a subregion based framework that uses a Markov Random Field to model the statistical distribution and spatial coherence of face texture, which makes our approach not only robust to harsh lighting conditions, but insensitive to partial occlusions as well. The performance of our...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Yang Wang, Zicheng Liu, Gang Hua, Zhen Wen, Zhengyou Zhang, Dimitris Samaras
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CVPR 2007, Face Recognition Rate, Harsh Lighting Conditions, Low-dimensional Linear Subspace, Subregion Based Framework, Unknown Face Geometry