1. A region based illumination-normalization system comprising: a high pass filter for receiving a test image to obtain a high frequency image; a low pass filter for receiving the test image to obtain a low frequency image; an image normalization unit for receiving the low frequency image and segmenting the low frequency image into a plurality of regions, and then normalizing each region to obtain a normalized low frequency image; and a combination unit for combining the normalized low frequency image and the high frequency image.