A novel illumination compensation algorithm for face recognition under non-uniform illumination conditions was presented. Firstly

the face images were transformed from spatial domain to logarithm domain

and the 2-dimensional wavelet transform was calculated. Secondly

coefficients of low-frequency sub-band image were discarded for face illumination compensation in logarithm domain. The effect of face illumination compensation was denoted by face recognition rate because that the intention of illumination compensation was to improve the performance of face recognition. The proposed approach was compared with the discrete cosine transform (DCT) method in logarithm domain on Yale B face database. The experimental results show that the average error rate of the proposed approach can reach 0.18%

which is superior to the DCT method for face illumination compensation in logarithm domain. Additionally

the experimental results on CAS_PEAL face database indicate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is equivalent to the DCT method.