Face representation under different illumination conditions

To deal with image variations due to illumination problem, recently Ramamoorthi and Basri have independently derived a spherical harmonic analysis for the Lambertian reflectance and linear subspace. Their theoretical work provided a new approach for face representation, however both of them had the assumption that the 3D surface normal and albedo are known. This assumption limits this algorithm's application. In this paper, we present a novel method for modeling 3D face shape and albedo from only three images with unknown light directions and this work well fills the blank, which Ramamoorthi and Basri left. By taking the advantage of similar 3D shape of all human faces, the highlight of the new method is that it circumambulates the linear ambiguity by 3D alignment. The experiment results show that our estimated model can be perfectly employed to face recognition and 3D reconstruction.