We propose a new illumination normalization for face recognition which robust in relation to the illumination variations on mobile devices. This research is novel in the following five ways when compared to previous works: (i) a new fuzzy-based Retinex method is proposed for illumination normalization; (ii) the performance of face recognition is enhanced by determining the optimal parameter of Retinex filtering based on fuzzy logic; (iii) the output of the fuzzy membership function is

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... determined based on the mean and standard deviations of the grey values of the detected face region; (iv) through the comparison of various defuzzification methods in terms of the accuracy of face recognition, one optimal method was selected; (v) we proved the validations of the proposed method by testing it with various face recognition methods. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of the face recognition with the proposed method was enhanced compared to previous ones.