To solve the complex and nonlinear illumination direction classification problem in face recognition

a method based on bifurcate tree and SVM is proposed in this paper. Before using the SVM

light directions are firstly sorted into a bifurcate tree according to its intrinsic intensity distribution which assure that only a few classes are sorted at every branch. Moreover

different features are extracted for SVM at the different levels according to the lighting characteristics of the corresponding levels. Experiment results show that the proposed method is efficient to solve multi-classes classification problem and the accuracy can be achieved to 89.16%.