IMAGE RECOGNIZING DEVICE, SHADOW REMOVING DEVICE, SHADOW REMOVING METHOD, AND STORAGE MEDIUM

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an image recognizing device or the like capable of coping with the change of illumination at photographing in recognizing an object via a photographed image. SOLUTION: This face image recognizing device 1 stores a plurality of face distance images generated in advance based on the measured results of the three-dimensional shapes of a plurality of faces and having the distances between a measuring device and the surfaces of the faces as pixel values on a memory section 11. An image intake section 13 receives the photographed image of the face from a camera 2 and requests the removal of a shadow to a shadow removing section 15 when judging that the face has the shadow. The shadow removing section 15 generates a synthetic image by changing the three-dimensional shape parameters of a face surface shape model acquired from the face distance images and illumination direction parameters, selects the parameters of the synthetic image having the highest similarity to the input image, and removes the shadow by dividing the luminance value of the corresponding pixels of the input image with the luminance values of the pixels of the synthetic image using the parameters. A recognizing section 17 conducts a prescribed recognizing process on the image, with the shadow removed.