Although progress in face recognition is encouraging, the accuracy rate of face recognition remains to be increased. Since the face image quality has a positive influence on face recognition accuracy, the image enhancement methods are popular in face recognition. Most current image enhancement methods aim at improving visual appearance, but cannot improve recognition accuracy remarkably. In this paper, a feature evaluation operator is designed to overcome this problem. The operator selects patches with the best quality, and then face image is reconstructed with the selected patches. The proposed algorithm is tested on two different face recognition applications. Accuracy is raised after enhancement, and the result proves that the proposed algorithm is effective.
