Light invariant video camera — making faces appear the same under any light conditions

Object appearance can change dramatically from one image to another. One of the main reasons for this is light variations. We created a video camera that is invariant to light conditions. Light condition can change in color, orientation or pattern. The system is based on principles from radio communication which is able to separates one station from the other. In a similar manner we modulate light intensity in time, and its influence on the scene is separated from other light sources using a match filter. The modulated light source is completely independent and is not synchronized with the camera. This simplifies the system considerably and enables shadow free objects with constant color. Therefore objects will always appear the same under any light conditions. This has the potential to improve performance of many machine vision algorithms. We demonstrate this by showing a performance improvement on commercially available face recognition system.