Face recognition robust to left/right shadows; facial symmetry

This paper has proposed an efficient shaded-face pre-processing technique using front-face symmetry. The existing face recognition PCA technique has a shortcoming of making illumination variation lower the recognition performance of a shaded face. The study has aimed to improve the performance by using the symmetry of the left and right face. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed face recognition method, the study experimented with the Yale face database with left/right shadows. The experimental methods for this are as following: the existing PCA, PCA with first three eigenfaces excluded, histogram equalization and the proposed method. As the result, it was shown that the proposed method has a rather excellent recognition performance (98.9%).