Abstract. Active differential imaging has been proved to be an effective approach to remove ambient illumination for face recognition. In this paper we address the problem caused by motion for a face recognition system based on active differential imaging. A moving face will appear at two different locations in the ambient illumination frame and combined illumination frame and as result artifacts are introduced to the difference face image. An approach based on motion compensation is proposed to deal with this problem. Experiments on moving faces demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in face identification and verification results.