1. A method for face recognition, comprising: receiving user image data including data representing a user face; detecting a user luminance of the data representing the user face in the user image data; selecting an adaptive low pass filter that corresponds to the user luminance; applying the adaptive low pass filter to the user image data to create a filtered user image; applying feature extraction to the filtered user image to create a filtered user image representation; from a reference image database containing a plurality of filtered reference image representations, selecting a filtered reference image representation that comprises a reference image that has been filtered with the adaptive low pass filter; and determining whether the filtered reference image representation matches the filtered user image representation.