The appearance of face will vary dramatically when the illumination changes,which makes face recognition even more challengeable.In this paper,an illumination compensation method by means of multi-level wavelet decomposition and spline interpolation is proposed to reduce the effect of illumination variation on face recognition.The light variation in an image can be modeled as additive noise and multiplicative noise.The additive noise,called background,can be estimated and eliminated by multi-level wavelet decomposition followed by spline interpolation;the multiplicative one,called gain,can be done in the similar way in the logarithm domain.Experimental results on Yale B face database show that the proposed method achieves 2%～11% recognition rate,higher than that of the others.It can effectively adjust the facial images under varying illumination conditions,as well as improve the recognition rate and robustness of face recognition.