The present invention relates to methods and systems for an illuminant compensation. In particular, these methods and systems include a method for operations on an image, for example, an image of a human face. In the described methods and systems, it is determined for each pixel in the image whether it is part of the face region. A surface fitting is then determined based on only the pixels that are determined to be part of the face region. Also, described are methods and systems for image normalization wherein the standard deviation and average for the gray levels of the pixels are determined and then used to normalize the image so that the gray level for each of the pixels falls between a particular range.