Abstract: A spectral reflectance recovery method based on multiplex illumination was proposed to be aimed at describing the facial complexion of each pixel more accurately. The main procedures are as follows:basis functions of facial spectral reflectance were analyzed based on the finite dimension model; the multispectral illumination system for facial image acquisition was designed, and the spectrum composition of the illumination applicable for the spectral reflectance recovery was determined; the influence of uneven illumination was reduced by correcting the image data based on flat-fielding; the function model between multi-spectral image data and the basis function coefficients was constructed to achieve spectral reflectance recovery. The results show that this method can achieve relatively high accuracy of facial spectral reflectance recovery with fewer parameters.