most outstanding abilities of human vision. Building an automated system that accomplishes such objective is very challenging. The challenges mainly come from the large variations in the visual stimulus due to illumination conditions, blurring and long distance acquisition. As part of an ongoing project tackling the detection and handling of those three problems, we present in this paper a review and a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art approaches to enhance the contrast and equalize the illumination of facial images. The comparative performance measurebased on appropriate metricsis accomplished among available methods, using two publicly available facial datasets with a total of about 500 images.