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

Detector adaptation by maximising agreement between independent data sources

Traditional methods for creating classifiers have two main disadvantages. Firstly, it is time consuming to acquire, or manually annotate, the training collection. Secondly, the data on which the classifier is trained may be over-generalised or too specific. This paper presents our investigations into overcoming both of these drawbacks simultaneously, by providing example applications where two data sources train each other. This removes both the need for supervised annotation or feedback, and allows rapid adaptation of the classifier to different data. Two applications are presented: one using thermal infrared and visual imagery to robustly learn changing skin models, and another using changes in saturation and luminance to learn shadow appearance parameters

Comparison of fusion methods for thermo-visual surveillance tracking

In this paper, we evaluate the appearance tracking performance of multiple fusion schemes that combine information from standard CCTV and thermal infrared spectrum video for the tracking of surveillance objects, such as people, faces, bicycles and vehicles. We show results on numerous real world multimodal surveillance sequences, tracking challenging objects whose appearance changes rapidly. Based on these results we can determine the most promising fusion scheme

Fusion of Visual and Thermal Images Using Genetic Algorithms

Demands for reliable person identification systems have increased significantly due to highly security risks in our daily life. Recently, person identification systems are built upon the biometrics techniques such as face recognition. Although face recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their accomplishments in practical applications are restricted by some challenges, such as illumination variations. Current visual face recognition systems perform relatively well under controlled illumination conditions while thermal face recognition systems are more advantageous for detecting disguised faces or when there is no illumination control. A hybrid system utilizing both visual and thermal images for face recognition will be beneficial. The overall goal of this research is to develop computational methods that improve image quality by fusing visual and thermal face images. First, three novel algorithms were proposed to enhance visual face images. In those techniques, specifical nonlinear image transfer functions were developed and parameters associated with the functions were determined by image statistics, making the algorithms adaptive. Second, methods were developed for registering the enhanced visual images to their corresponding thermal images. Landmarks in the images were first detected and a subset of those landmarks were selected to compute a transformation matrix for the registration. Finally, A Genetic algorithm was proposed to fuse the registered visual and thermal images. Experimental results showed that image quality can be significantly improved using the proposed framework

Fusion of Visual and Thermal Images Using Genetic Algorithms

Biometric technologies such as fingerprint, hand geometry, face and iris recognition are widely used to identify a person's identity. The face recognition system is currently one of the most important biometric technologies, which identifies a person by comparing individually acquired face images with a set of pre-stored face templates in a database

Thermo-visual feature fusion for object tracking using multiple spatiogram trackers

In this paper, we propose a framework that can efficiently combine features for robust tracking based on fusing the outputs of multiple spatiogram trackers. This is achieved without the exponential increase in storage and processing that other multimodal tracking approaches suffer from. The framework allows the features to be split arbitrarily between the trackers, as well as providing the flexibility to add, remove or dynamically weight features. We derive a mean-shift type algorithm for the framework that allows efficient object tracking with very low computational overhead. We especially target the fusion of thermal infrared and visible spectrum features as the most useful features for automated surveillance applications. Results are shown on multimodal video sequences clearly illustrating the benefits of combining multiple features using our framework

Interest Points as a Focus Measure in Multi-Spectral Imaging

A novel multi-spectral focus measure that is based on algorithms for interest point detection, particularly on the FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test), Fast Hessian and Harris-Laplace detector, is described in this paper. The proposed measure methods are compared with commonly used focus measure techniques like energy of image gradient, sum-modified Laplacian, Tenenbaum's algorithm or spatial frequency when testing their reliability and performance. The measures have been tested on a newly created database containing 420 images acquired in visible, near-infrared and thermal spectrum (7 objects in each spectrum). Algorithms based on the interest point detectors proved to be good focus measures satisfying all the requirements described in the paper, especially in thermal spectrum. It is shown that these algorithms outperformed all commonly used methods in thermal spectrum and therefore can serve as a new and more accurate focus measure