Between October 2000 and December 2000, we collected a database of over 40,000 facial images of 68 people. Using the CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) 3D Room, we imaged each person across 13 different poses, under 43 different illumination conditions, and with four different expressions. We call this database the CMU Pose, Illumination and Expression (PIE) database. In this paper, we describe the imaging hardware, the collection procedure, the organization of the database, several potential uses of the database, and how to obtain the database.