Patent ID: 7103225

Claim:
In a set of digital images, each representing a subject having an identity and each digital image having a corresponding illumination condition, wherein a subset of the set of digital images representing a same corresponding subject are related by a mathematical representation of a structure in a multidimensional space, a computer based method for identity based clustering the digital images having various illumination conditions and representing a first subject having a first identity, the method comprising: composing a set of affinity measures for every pair of digital images in the set of digital images, each affinity measure representative of a relationship between the pair of digital images of the set of images with respect to the structure in the multidimensional space; and applying an identity-based clustering algorithm to the set of affinity measures to determine a first subset of the set of images representing the first subject, wherein the images of said first subset are related by the mathematical representation of the structure in the multidimensional space, and wherein the first identity is undetermined prior to said step of applying the identity-based clustering algorithm.