• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.179-184
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• 2009

Robust face recognition under various illumination environments is difficult to achieve. For face recognition robust to illumination changes, usually face images are normalized with respect to illumination as a preprocessing step before face recognition. The anisotropic smoothing-based illumination normalization method, known to be one of the best illumination normalization methods, cannot handle casting shadows. In this paper, we present an efficient illumination normalization method for face recognition. The proposed illumination normalization method separates the effect of illumination from eigenfaces and constructs an illumination-separated eigenface subspace. Then, an incoming face image is projected into the subspace and the obtained projected face image is rendered so that illumination effects including casting shadows are reduced as much as possible. Application to real face images shows the proposed illumination normalization method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.25-34
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• 2010

Robust face recognition under various illumination environments is difficult to achieve. For robust face recognition with respect to illumination variations, illumination normalization of face images is usually applied as a preprocessing step. Most of previously proposed illumination normalization methods cannot handle cast shadows in face images effectively. In this paper, We propose a new face illumination normalization method based on the illumination-separated face identity texture subspace. Since the face identity texture subspace is constructed so as to be separated from the effects of illumination variations, the projection of face images into the subspace produces a good illumination-normalized face images. Through experiments, it is shown that the proposed face illumination normalization method can effectively eliminate cast shadows as well as attached shadows and achieves a good face illumination normalization.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Emotion and Sensibility Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.1-2
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• 2011

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.12
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• pp.1926-1931
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• 2012

We investigated a novel fast non-uniform illumination correction method for bi-level images. The proposed method divides a bi-level image into sub-images and roughly estimates block-wise illumination by low pass filtered maximum values of sub-images. After that, we apply bilinear interpolation using the block-wise illumination to estimate non-uniform illumination, and compensate for the effect of non-uniform illumination using the estimated illumination. Since the proposed method is not based on computation intensive iterative optimization, the proposed method can be used effectively for applications that require fast correction of non-uniform illumination. In simulations, the proposed method showed more than 20 times faster speed than existing entropy minimization method. Moreover, in simulations and experiments, the restored images by the proposed method were more close to true images than images restored by conventional method.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.236-245
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• 2008

Robust face recognition under various illumination environments is very difficult and needs to be accomplished for successful commercialization. In this paper, we propose an efficient illumination preprocessing method for face recognition. illumination preprocessing algorithm based on anisotropic smoothing is well known to be effective among illumination normalization methods but deteriorates the intensity contrast of the original image, and incurs less sharp edges. The proposed method in this paper improves the previous anisotropic smoothing based illumination normalization method so that it increases the intensity contrast and enhances the edges while diminishing effects of illumination. Due to the result of these improvements, face images preprocessed by the proposed illumination preprocessing method becomes to have more distinctive feature vectors(Gabor feature vectors). Through experiments of face recognition using Gabor jet similarity, the effectiveness of the proposed illumination preprocessing method is verified.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.25-44
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• 2010

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, it has become necessary to protect private information and content in these devices. Face recognition has been favored over conventional passwords or security keys, because it can be easily implemented using a built-in camera, while providing user convenience. However, because mobile devices can be used both indoors and outdoors, there can be many illumination changes, which can reduce the accuracy of face recognition. Therefore, we propose a new face recognition method on a mobile device robust to illumination variations. This research makes the following four original contributions. First, we compared the performance of face recognition with illumination variations on mobile devices for several illumination normalization procedures suitable for mobile devices with low processing power. These include the Retinex filter, histogram equalization and histogram stretching. Second, we compared the performance for global and local methods of face recognition such as PCA (Principal Component Analysis), LNMF (Local Non-negative Matrix Factorization) and LBP (Local Binary Pattern) using an integer-based kernel suitable for mobile devices having low processing power. Third, the characteristics of each method according to the illumination va iations are analyzed. Fourth, we use two matching scores for several methods of illumination normalization, Retinex and histogram stretching, which show the best and $2^{nd}$ best performances, respectively. These are used as the inputs of an SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier, which can increase the accuracy of face recognition. Experimental results with two databases (data collected by a mobile device and the AR database) showed that the accuracy of face recognition achieved by the proposed method was superior to that of other methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.955-956
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• 2008

This paper presents a new method for illumination normalization in eye detection. Based on the retinex image formation model, we employ the discrete wavelet transform to remove the lighting effect in face image data. The final result based on the proposed method shows the better performance in detecting eyes compared with previous work.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.49-55
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• 2010

Cast shadow caused by an illumination condition can produce troublesome effects for face recognition system using reflectance image. Consequently, we need to separate cast shadow area from feature area for improvement of recognition accuracy. A Bilateral filter smooths image while preserving edges, by means of a nonlinear combination of nearby pixel values. Processing such characteristics, this method is suited to our purpose in illumination estimation process based on Retinex. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new illumination normalization method based on the Bilateral filter in face images. The proposed method produces a reflectance image that is preserved relatively exact cast shadow area, because coefficient of filter is designed to multiply proximity and discontinuity of pixels in input image. Performance of our method is measured by a recognition accuracy of principle component analysis(PCA) and evaluated to compare with other conventional illumination normalization methods.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37 no.8C
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• pp.711-720
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• 2012

In this paper, we introduce the implementation of driver fatigue monitering system and its result. Input video device is selected commercially available web-cam camera. Haar transform is used to face detection and adopted illumination normalization is used for arbitrary illumination conditions. Facial image through illumination normalization is extracted using Haar face features easily. Eye candidate area through illumination normalization can be reduced by anthropometric measurement and eye detection is performed by PCA and Circle Mask mixture model. This methods achieve robust eye detection on arbitrary illumination changing conditions. Drowsiness state is determined by the level on illumination normalize eye images by a simple calculation. Our system alarms and operates seatbelt on vibration through controller area network(CAN) when the driver's doze level is detected. Our algorithm is implemented with low computation complexity and high recognition rate. We achieve 97% of correct detection rate through in-car environment experiments.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.54-60
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• 2004

Face recognition is one of the problems to be solved by appearance based matching technique. However, the appearance of face image is very sensitive to variation in illumination. One of the easiest ways for better performance is to collect more training samples acquired under variable lightings but it is not practical in real world. ]:n object recognition, it is desirable to focus on feature extraction or normalization technique rather than focus on classifier. This paper presents a simple approach to normalization of faces subject to directional illumination. This is one of the significant issues that cause error in the face recognition process. The proposed method, ICR(illumination Compensation based on Multiple Linear Regression), is to find the plane that best fits the intensity distribution of the face image using the multiple linear regression, then use this plane to normalize the face image. The advantages of our method are simple and practical. The planar approximation of a face image is mathematically defined by the simple linear model. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed ICR method on public face databases and our database. The experimental results show a significant improvement of the recognition accuracy.