Patent ID: 8503800

Claim:
A face illumination normalization method, comprising: (a) acquiring a digital image including data corresponding to a face that appears to be illuminated unevenly; (b) applying one or more uneven illumination cascaded classifier chains to the face data; (c) identifying the face data as corresponding to said face within the digital image; (d) determining an uneven illumination condition for the face also as a result of the applying of the one or more uneven illumination cascaded classifier chains; (e) correcting the uneven illumination condition of the face based on the determining to thereby generate a corrected face image appearing to have more uniform illumination; and (f) electronically storing, transmitting, applying a face recognition program to, editing, or displaying the corrected face image, or combinations thereof, wherein the applying comprises applying at least two full classifier sets after determining that no single illumination condition applies and that the face data is not rejected as a face.