With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, it has become necessary to protect private information and content in these devices. Face recognition has been favored over conventional passwords or security keys, because it can be easily implemented using a built-in camera, while providing user convenience. However, because mobile devices can be used both indoors and outdoors, there can be many illumination changes, which can reduce the accuracy of face recognition. Therefore, we propose a new face recognition method on a mobile device robust to illumination variations. This research makes the following four original contributions. First, we compared the performance of face recognition with illumination variations on mobile devices for several illumination normalization procedures suitable for mobile devices with low processing power. These include the Retinex filter, histogram equalization and histogram stretching. Second, we compared the performance for global and local methods of face recognition such as PCA (Principal Component Analysis), LNMF (Local Non-negative Matrix Factorization) and LBP (Local Binary Pattern) using an integer-based kernel suitable for mobile devices having low processing power. Third, the characteristics of each method according to the illumination va iations are analyzed. Fourth, we use two matching scores for several methods of illumination normalization, Retinex and histogram stretching, which show the best and $2^{nd}$ best performances, respectively. These are used as the inputs of an SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier, which can increase the accuracy of face recognition. Experimental results with two databases (data collected by a mobile device and the AR database) showed that the accuracy of face recognition achieved by the proposed method was superior to that of other methods.