A novel method to extract illumination invariant features using the adaptive filter is proposed for face recognition under varying lighting conditions, the proposed method estimates illumination by minimizing the difference between the normalized illumination and estimated original illumination in the logarithm domain. To evaluate effectiveness of our method, three illumination methods (MSR, SQI and LTV) were implemented using Yale B database. It shows that the performance of the proposed method is better than other methods. © 2009 IEEE.