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

On Person Authentication by Fusing Visual and Thermal Face Biometrics

Recognition algorithms that use data obtained by imaging faces in the thermal spectrum are promising in achieving invariance to extreme illumination changes that are often present in practice. In this paper we analyze the performance of a recently proposed face recognition algorithm that combines visual and thermal modalities by decision level fusion. We examine (i) the effects of the proposed data preprocessing in each domain, (ii) the contribution to improved recognition of different types of features, (iii) the importance of prescription glasses detection, in the context of both 1-to-N and 1-to-1 matching (recognition vs. verification performance). Finally, we discuss the significance of our results and, in particular, identify a number of limitations of the current state-of-the-art and propose promising directions for future research

Multi-Modality Human Action Recognition

Human action recognition is very useful in many applications in various areas, e.g. video surveillance, HCI (Human computer interaction), video retrieval, gaming and security. Recently, human action recognition becomes an active research topic in computer vision and pattern recognition. A number of action recognition approaches have been proposed. However, most of the approaches are designed on the RGB images sequences, where the action data was collected by RGB/intensity camera. Thus the recognition performance is usually related to various occlusion, background, and lighting conditions of the image sequences. If more information can be provided along with the image sequences, more data sources other than the RGB video can be utilized, human actions could be better represented and recognized by the designed computer vision system.;In this dissertation, the multi-modality human action recognition is studied. On one hand, we introduce the study of multi-spectral action recognition, which involves the information from different spectrum beyond visible, e.g. infrared and near infrared. Action recognition in individual spectra is explored and new methods are proposed. Then the cross-spectral action recognition is also investigated and novel approaches are proposed in our work. On the other hand, since the depth imaging technology has made a significant progress recently, where depth information can be captured simultaneously with the RGB videos. The depth-based human action recognition is also investigated. I first propose a method combining different type of depth data to recognize human actions. Then a thorough evaluation is conducted on spatiotemporal interest point (STIP) based features for depth-based action recognition. Finally, I advocate the study of fusing different features for depth-based action analysis. Moreover, human depression recognition is studied by combining facial appearance model as well as facial dynamic model

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

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

Remote sensing image fusion on 3D scenarios: A review of applications for agriculture and forestry

Three-dimensional (3D) image mapping of real-world scenarios has a great potential to provide the user with a more accurate scene understanding. This will enable, among others, unsupervised automatic sampling of meaningful material classes from the target area for adaptive semi-supervised deep learning techniques. This path is already being taken by the recent and fast-developing research in computational fields, however, some issues related to computationally expensive processes in the integration of multi-source sensing data remain. Recent studies focused on Earth observation and characterization are enhanced by the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and sensors able to capture massive datasets with a high spatial resolution. In this scope, many approaches have been presented for 3D modeling, remote sensing, image processing and mapping, and multi-source data fusion. This survey aims to present a summary of previous work according to the most relevant contributions for the reconstruction and analysis of 3D models of real scenarios using multispectral, thermal and hyperspectral imagery. Surveyed applications are focused on agriculture and forestry since these fields concentrate most applications and are widely studied. Many challenges are currently being overcome by recent methods based on the reconstruction of multi-sensorial 3D scenarios. In parallel, the processing of large image datasets has recently been accelerated by General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) approaches that are also summarized in this work. Finally, as a conclusion, some open issues and future research directions are presented.European Commission 1381202-GEU PYC20-RE-005-UJA IEG-2021Junta de Andalucia 1381202-GEU PYC20-RE-005-UJA IEG-2021Instituto de Estudios GiennesesEuropean CommissionSpanish Government UIDB/04033/2020DATI-Digital Agriculture TechnologiesPortuguese Foundation for Science and Technology 1381202-GEU FPU19/0010