Illumination invariant face recognition using contourlet transform and convolutional neural network

The face is a dominant biometric for recognizing a person. However, face recognition becomes challenging when there are severe changes in lighting conditions, i.e., illumination variations, which have been shown to have a more severe effect on recognition performance than the inherent differences between individuals. Most of the existing methods for tackling the problem of illumination variation assume that illumination lies in the large-scale component of a facial image; as such, the large-scale component is discarded, and features are extracted from small-scale components. Recently, it has been shown that large-scale component is also important; in addition, small-scale component contains detrimental noise features. Keeping this in view, we introduce a method for illumination invariant face recognition that exploits large-scale and small-scale components by discarding the illumination artifacts and detrimental noise using ContourletDS. After discarding the unwanted components, local and global features are extracted using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model; we examined three widely employed CNN models: VGG-16, GoogLeNet, and ResNet152. To reduce the dimensions of local and global features and fuse them, we employ linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Finally, ridge regression is used for recognition. The method was evaluated on three benchmark datasets; it achieved accuracies of 99.7%, 100%, and 79.76% on Extended Yale B, AR, and M-PIE, respectively. The comparison reveals that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.