Infrared face recognition: a comprehensive review of methodologies and databases

Automatic face recognition is an area with immense practical potential which includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications. Hence it is unsurprising that it continues to be one of the most active research areas of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the state-of-the-art in face recognition continues to improve, benefitting from advances in a range of different research fields such as image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics, and physiology. Systems based on visible spectrum images, the most researched face recognition modality, have reached a significant level of maturity with some practical success. However, they continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly decrease recognition accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR) imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject. Our key contributions are: (i) a summary of the inherent properties of infrared imaging which makes this modality promising in the context of face recognition, (ii) a systematic review of the most influential approaches, with a focus on emerging common trends as well as key differences between alternative methodologies, (iii) a description of the main databases of infrared facial images available to the researcher, and lastly (iv) a discussion of the most promising avenues for future research.Comment: Pattern Recognition, 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1306.160

Cross-Spectral Full and Partial Face Recognition: Preprocessing, Feature Extraction and Matching

Cross-spectral face recognition remains a challenge in the area of biometrics. The problem arises from some real-world application scenarios such as surveillance at night time or in harsh environments, where traditional face recognition techniques are not suitable or limited due to usage of imagery obtained in the visible light spectrum. This motivates the study conducted in the dissertation which focuses on matching infrared facial images against visible light images. The study outspreads from aspects of face recognition such as preprocessing to feature extraction and to matching.;We address the problem of cross-spectral face recognition by proposing several new operators and algorithms based on advanced concepts such as composite operators, multi-level data fusion, image quality parity, and levels of measurement. To be specific, we experiment and fuse several popular individual operators to construct a higher-performed compound operator named GWLH which exhibits complementary advantages of involved individual operators. We also combine a Gaussian function with LBP, generalized LBP, WLD and/or HOG and modify them into multi-lobe operators with smoothed neighborhood to have a new type of operators named Composite Multi-Lobe Descriptors. We further design a novel operator termed Gabor Multi-Levels of Measurement based on the theory of levels of measurements, which benefits from taking into consideration the complementary edge and feature information at different levels of measurements.;The issue of image quality disparity is also studied in the dissertation due to its common occurrence in cross-spectral face recognition tasks. By bringing the quality of heterogeneous imagery closer to each other, we successfully achieve an improvement in the recognition performance. We further study the problem of cross-spectral recognition using partial face since it is also a common problem in practical usage. We begin with matching heterogeneous periocular regions and generalize the topic by considering all three facial regions defined in both a characteristic way and a mixture way.;In the experiments we employ datasets which include all the sub-bands within the infrared spectrum: near-infrared, short-wave infrared, mid-wave infrared, and long-wave infrared. Different standoff distances varying from short to intermediate and long are considered too. Our methods are compared with other popular or state-of-the-art methods and are proven to be advantageous

Face Recognition Based on Statistical Texture Features

Facial recognition has attracted the attention of researchers and has been one of the most prominent topics in the fields of image processing and pattern recognition since 1990. This resulted in a very large number of recognition methods and techniques with the aim of increasing the accuracy and robustness of existing systems. Many techniques have been developed to address the challenges and reliable recognition systems have been reached but require considerable processing time, suffer from high memory consumption and are relatively complex. The focus of this paper is on extracting subset of descriptors (less correlated and less calculations) from the co-occurrence matrix with the goal of enhancing the performance of Haralick’s descriptors. Improvements are achieved by adding the image pre-processing and selecting the proper method according to the database problem and by extracting features from image local regions

Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Face Recognition: Enhancing, Encoding and Matching for Practical Applications

Face Recognition is the automatic processing of face images with the purpose to recognize individuals. Recognition task becomes especially challenging in surveillance applications, where images are acquired from a long range in the presence of difficult environments. Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) is an emerging imaging modality that is able to produce clear long range images in difficult environments or during night time. Despite the benefits of the SWIR technology, matching SWIR images against a gallery of visible images presents a challenge, since the photometric properties of the images in the two spectral bands are highly distinct.;In this dissertation, we describe a cross spectral matching method that encodes magnitude and phase of multi-spectral face images filtered with a bank of Gabor filters. The magnitude of filtered images is encoded with Simplified Weber Local Descriptor (SWLD) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operators. The phase is encoded with Generalized Local Binary Pattern (GLBP) operator. Encoded multi-spectral images are mapped into a histogram representation and cross matched by applying symmetric Kullback-Leibler distance. Performance of the developed algorithm is demonstrated on TINDERS database that contains long range SWIR and color images acquired at a distance of 2, 50, and 106 meters.;Apart from long acquisition range, other variations and distortions such as pose variation, motion and out of focus blur, and uneven illumination may be observed in multispectral face images. Recognition performance of the face recognition matcher can be greatly affected by these distortions. It is important, therefore, to ensure that matching is performed on high quality images. Poor quality images have to be either enhanced or discarded. This dissertation addresses the problem of selecting good quality samples.;The last chapters of the dissertation suggest a number of modifications applied to the cross spectral matching algorithm for matching low resolution color images in near-real time. We show that the method that encodes the magnitude of Gabor filtered images with the SWLD operator guarantees high recognition rates. The modified method (Gabor-SWLD) is adopted in a camera network set up where cameras acquire several views of the same individual. The designed algorithm and software are fully automated and optimized to perform recognition in near-real time. We evaluate the recognition performance and the processing time of the method on a small dataset collected at WVU

Features for Cross Spectral Image Matching: A Survey

In recent years, cross spectral matching has been gaining attention in various biometric systems for identification and verification purposes. Cross spectral matching allows images taken under different electromagnetic spectrums to match each other. In cross spectral matching, one of the keys for successful matching is determined by the features used for representing an image. Therefore, the feature extraction step becomes an essential task. Researchers have improved matching accuracy by developing robust features. This paper presents most commonly selected features used in cross spectral matching. This survey covers basic concepts of cross spectral matching, visual and thermal features extraction, and state of the art descriptors. In the end, this paper provides a description of better feature selection methods in cross spectral matching

Parts-based object detection using multiple views

One of the most important problems in image understanding is robust object detection. Small changes in object appearance due to illumination, viewpoint, and occlusion can drastically change the performance of many object detection methods. Non-rigid object can be even more difficult to reliably detect. The unique contribution of this thesis was to extend the approach of parts-based object detection to include support for multiple viewing angles. Bayesian networks were used to integrate the parts detection of each view in a flexible manner, so that the experimental performance of each part detector could be incorporated into the decision. The detectors were implemented using neural networks trained using the bootstrapping method of repeated backpropagation, where false-positives are introduced to the training set as negative examples. The Bayesian networks were trained with a separate dataset to gauge the performance of each part detector. The final decision of object detection system was made with a logical OR operation. The domain of human face detection was used to demonstrate the power of this approach. The FERET human face database was selected to provide both training and testing images; a frontal and a side view were chosen from the available poses. Part detectors were trained on four features from each view?the right and left eyes, the nose, and the mouth. The individual part detection rates ranged from 85% to 95% against testing images. Crossvalidation was used to test the system as a whole, giving average view detection rates of 96.7% and 97.2% respectively for the frontal and side views, and an overall face detection rate of 96.9% amongst true-positive images. A 5.7% false-positive rate was demonstrated against background clutter images. These results compare favorably with existing methods, but provide the additional benefit of face detection at different view angles