Face Recognition Robust to Illumination Variations

Abstract

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 talk, we present 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.

Speaker Biography

Muhittin Gökmen received his BS degree in electrical engineering from the Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 1982. He received the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, in 1986 and 1990, respectively. In 1991, he served as a post doctoral research associate at the same university. In 1992, he joined the Computer Engineering Department at the Istanbul Technical University as an assistant professor, and became associate professor,
and professor there in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He served as dean of Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from 2001 to 2004, and as chairman of Computer Engineering Department of ITU.

His research interests include early vision problems, model based image and video compression, face and fingerprint recognition, and content based image retrieval. He is a founding director of the Computer Vision and Image Processing (CVIP) Laboratory, the Multimedia Center, and the Software Development Center at the Istanbul Technical University. He was the chair of the Third Workshop on Signal
Processing and Applications (SIU'95), Nevsehir, Turkey (1993), a member of the organizing committee of the 10th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS X), Kusadasi, Turkey (1995), and co-chair of the Workshop on Signal Processing and Applications (SIU'04), Kusadasi, Turkey (2004). Dr. Gökmen was the Student Relations Chairman of IEEE Turkey Section (1994-1996), and the IEEE Student Branch Counselor at the Istanbul Technical University. He
is founder of a company, Divit-Digital Video and Image Technologies Inc., which is the first innovation company founded by a faculty member at ITU Technocity. Dr. Gokmen was the general chair of the 23rd International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS'08) held on 27-29 October, 2008 at Istanbul Technical University.