Abstract: The traditional face recognition method has high requirement to the face image to be recognized and require that there are little illumination differences between the face image acquired and the image in the training database,which restrict the environmental condition in which the face recognition system is operated, thus restrict the application of face recogntion. In order to lessen the requirement of environmental condition in the face recognition and overcome the effect of illumination to the face recognition, the paper analyzed the amplitude-frequency characteristic and phase-frequency characteristic and put forward the illumination normalized face recognition method in the frequency domain.By normalization, the illumination between the i:工cage acquired and the it工cage in the training database is identical and also the distinguishable property of face image was preserved. Generally, the information of the differences among the face images is less, so this paper considered the minimum non-zero eigenvector as the face feature. By the experiment simulation, compared with the traditional face recognition method, the method put forward in this paper is robust to illumination change.

Key words: Chara cteristic evaluation, Phase-frequency characteristic, Illumination robustness, Minimum non-zero eigenvector