Patent ID: 6975763

Claim:
An apparatus for removing a shade component from an image, comprising: calculating section for performing principle component analysis on a set of face images having various types of shades to generate an eigen space; storing section for storing the eigen space generated by said calculating section; input section for receiving as an input a new face image; projecting section for projecting the face image input through said input section to the eigen space stored in said storing section; and producing section for producing a face image with shade component removed, based on the face image input through said input section and the image projected by said projecting section to the eigen space, wherein said calculating section includes face component extracting section for extracting shape of each portion of each of the face images; mean shape calculating section for calculating a mean shape for the set of said face images; mean shape transforming section for transforming each face image to the calculated mean shape; and principle component analyzing section for performing principle component analysis on the face images transformed to the mean shape to calculate eigen vectors to be base vectors of the eigen space.