An active illumination and appearance (AIA) model for face alignment

Face recognition systems are typically required to work under highly varying illumination conditions. This leads to complex effects imposed on the acquired face image that pertains little to the actual identity. Consequently, illumination normalization is required to reach acceptable recognition rates in face recognition systems. In this paper we propose an approach that integrates the face identity and illumination models under the widely used Active Appearance Model framework as an extension to the texture model in order to obtain illumination-invariant face localization.