In order to eliminate the effect of varying illumination on face recognition

a novel illumination invariant method based on the Gabor phase-frequency feature is proposed.The method first performs illumination normalization on image under various lighting conditions

which can reduce the effect of varying illumination to some extent.Secondly

a set of 2D real Gabor wavelets with different directions are used for image transformation

and multiple Gabor coefficients are combined into one whole in considering spectrum and phase.Lastly

the illumination invariant is obtained by extracting the phase feature from the combined coefficients.Experimental results on the Yale face database B and on the CMU PIE database show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the effect of varying illumination on face recognition

and that extracted illumination invariant is robust.