Abstract: In illumination variant face recognition, existing
methods extracting face albedo as light normalized image may lead to
loss of extensive facial details, with light template discarded. To
improve that, a novel approach for realistic facial texture
reconstruction by combining original image and albedo image is
proposed. First, light subspaces of different identities are established
from the given reference face images; then by projecting the original
and albedo image into each light subspace respectively, texture
reference images with corresponding lighting are reconstructed and
two texture subspaces are formed. According to the projections in
texture subspaces, facial texture with normal light can be synthesized.
Due to the combination of original image, facial details can be
preserved with face albedo. In addition, image partition is applied to
improve the synthesization performance. Experiments on Yale B and
CMUPIE databases demonstrate that this algorithm outperforms the
others both in image representation and in face recognition.