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

An Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Nitrogen Dioxide Emissions Characteristics of Compression Ignition Dual Fuel Engines

Detailed experimental research was conducted to explore the impact of the addition of gaseous fuels, including H2 and natural gas (NG), and engine load on the emissions of NO2, NO, and NOx from dual fuel engines. The addition of less than 2% of H2 or NG was shown to dramatically increase the emissions of NO2 until a maximum level of NO2 emissions was reached. The increased NO 2 emissions were due to the conversion of NO to NO2. The maximum NO2/NOx ratio obtained with the addition of H2 was 3.2 to 5.0 times that of diesel operation. The maximum NO 2/NOx ratio obtained with the addition of NG was 3.4 to 4.3 times that of diesel operation. Further increasing the amount of gaseous fuel beyond the point of maximum NO2 emissions resulted in a reduction of NO2 emissions. Detailed examination of factors having the potential to affect the formation of NOx and NO2 in compression ignition engines reported a firm correlation between the emissions of NO 2 and emissions of unburned H2 and methane (CH4), and their relative emissions. The presence of unburned gaseous fuels that survived the main combustion process appears to be one of the main factors contributing to the enhanced conversion of NO to NO2. This was supported by the experimental data reported in the literature. The presence of fumigation fuels outside the diesel spray plume might be the main factor contributing to the increased emissions of NO2 from dual fuel engines. The spontaneous combustion of fumigation fuels that are entrained into the diesel spray plume may not contribute to the increased emissions of NO 2. In comparison, the correlations between the increased emissions of NO2 and the variation in bulk mixture temperature and heat release process including maximum heat release rate, and combustion duration were weak.;A single zone, zero-dimensional, constant volume numerical model with detailed chemistry was used to simulate the oxidization process of the gaseous fuel, as well as its effect on the conversion of NO to NO2 after the post-combustion mixing of the gaseous fuel surviving the main combustion process with the NOx-containing combustion products. The gaseous fuel examined included CH4, H2, and carbon monoxide (CO). The simulation results revealed the significant effects of the fuel mixed, its initial concentration in the mixture, and the initial temperature on the oxidization of gaseous fuel, the conversion of NO to NO2, and the destruction of NO2 to NO after the completion of the oxidation process.;The single zone zero-dimensional model was further modified to a variable volume model with the volume of the combustion chamber calculated using the geometry of the 1999 Cummins engine and engine speed. The modified variable volume model with detailed chemistry was used to improve the simulation of the effect on the conversion of NO to NO2 of the post-combustion mixing of surviving gaseous fuel with NOx-containing combustion products. The spatial variation of the local bulk mixture temperature with the progress of the combustion process and the variation of cylinder volume during the expansion process was taken into account by a pseudo temperature at the top dead center (TDC) noted as Tpseudo TDC defined in this research. The simulation identified the importance of the phasing of postcombustion mixing on the oxidation of gaseous fuel and its effect on the conversion of NO to NO2.;A preliminary sensitivity analysis was also conducted to identify the reactions having significant effect on the conversion of NO to NO2 and its destruction to NO. Among the four reactions associated with the formation and destruction of NO2, R186 was identified as the main reaction to the formation of NO2 during the oxidation process of H 2 and CO. This was due to the high concentration of HO2 formed during the oxidation process of H2 and CO in the combustion product. The destruction of NO2 to NO occurred through R187 and R189. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Face Image Modality Recognition and Photo-Sketch Matching

Face is an important physical characteristic of human body, and is widely used in many crucial applications, such as video surveillance, criminal investigation, and security access system. Based on realistic demand, such as useful face images in dark environment and criminal profile, different modalities of face images appeared, e.g. three-dimensional (3D), near infrared (NIR), and thermal infrared (TIR) face images. Thus, researches with various face image modalities become a hot area. Most of them are set on knowing the modality of face images in advance, which contains a few limitations. In this thesis, we present approaches for face image modality recognition to extend the possibility of cross-modality researches as well as handle new modality-mixed face images. Furthermore, a large facial image database is assembled with five commonly used modalities such as 3D, NIR, TIR, sketch, and visible light spectrum (VIS). Based on the analysis of results, a feature descriptor based on convolutional neural network with linear kernel SVM did an optimal performance.;As we mentioned above, face images are widely used in crucial applications, and one of them is using the sketch of suspect\u27s face, which based on the witness\u27 description, to assist law enforcement. Since it is difficult to capture face photos of the suspect during a criminal activity, automatic retrieving photos based on the suspect\u27s facial sketch is used for locating potential suspects. In this thesis, we perform photo-sketch matching by synthesizing the corresponding pseudo sketch from a given photo. There are three methods applied in this thesis, which are respectively based on style transfer, DualGAN, and cycle-consistent adversarial networks. Among the results of these methods, style transfer based method did a poor performance in photo-sketch matching, since it is an unsupervised one which is not purposeful in photo to sketch synthesis problem while the others need to train pointed models in synthesis stage

Unifying the Visible and Passive Infrared Bands: Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multi-Spectral Face Recognition

Face biometrics leverages tools and technology in order to automate the identification of individuals. In most cases, biometric face recognition (FR) can be used for forensic purposes, but there remains the issue related to the integration of technology into the legal system of the court. The biggest challenge with the acceptance of the face as a modality used in court is the reliability of such systems under varying pose, illumination and expression, which has been an active and widely explored area of research over the last few decades (e.g. same-spectrum or homogeneous matching). The heterogeneous FR problem, which deals with matching face images from different sensors, should be examined for the benefit of military and law enforcement applications as well. In this work we are concerned primarily with visible band images (380-750 nm) and the infrared (IR) spectrum, which has become an area of growing interest.;For homogeneous FR systems, we formulate and develop an efficient, semi-automated, direct matching-based FR framework, that is designed to operate efficiently when face data is captured using either visible or passive IR sensors. Thus, it can be applied in both daytime and nighttime environments. First, input face images are geometrically normalized using our pre-processing pipeline prior to feature-extraction. Then, face-based features including wrinkles, veins, as well as edges of facial characteristics, are detected and extracted for each operational band (visible, MWIR, and LWIR). Finally, global and local face-based matching is applied, before fusion is performed at the score level. Although this proposed matcher performs well when same-spectrum FR is performed, regardless of spectrum, a challenge exists when cross-spectral FR matching is performed. The second framework is for the heterogeneous FR problem, and deals with the issue of bridging the gap across the visible and passive infrared (MWIR and LWIR) spectrums. Specifically, we investigate the benefits and limitations of using synthesized visible face images from thermal and vice versa, in cross-spectral face recognition systems when utilizing canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and locally linear embedding (LLE), a manifold learning technique for dimensionality reduction. Finally, by conducting an extensive experimental study we establish that the combination of the proposed synthesis and demographic filtering scheme increases system performance in terms of rank-1 identification rate

Eye Detection and Face Recognition Across the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Biometrics, or the science of identifying individuals based on their physiological or behavioral traits, has increasingly been used to replace typical identifying markers such as passwords, PIN numbers, passports, etc. Different modalities, such as face, fingerprint, iris, gait, etc. can be used for this purpose. One of the most studied forms of biometrics is face recognition (FR). Due to a number of advantages over typical visible to visible FR, recent trends have been pushing the FR community to perform cross-spectral matching of visible images to face images from higher spectra in the electromagnetic spectrum.;In this work, the SWIR band of the EM spectrum is the primary focus. Four main contributions relating to automatic eye detection and cross-spectral FR are discussed. First, a novel eye localization algorithm for the purpose of geometrically normalizing a face across multiple SWIR bands for FR algorithms is introduced. Using a template based scheme and a novel summation range filter, an extensive experimental analysis show that this algorithm is fast, robust, and highly accurate when compared to other available eye detection methods. Also, the eye locations produced by this algorithm provides higher FR results than all other tested approaches. This algorithm is then augmented and updated to quickly and accurately detect eyes in more challenging unconstrained datasets, spanning the EM spectrum. Additionally, a novel cross-spectral matching algorithm is introduced that attempts to bridge the gap between the visible and SWIR spectra. By fusing multiple photometric normalization combinations, the proposed algorithm is not only more efficient than other visible-SWIR matching algorithms, but more accurate in multiple challenging datasets. Finally, a novel pre-processing algorithm is discussed that bridges the gap between document (passport) and live face images. It is shown that the pre-processing scheme proposed, using inpainting and denoising techniques, significantly increases the cross-document face recognition performance

New Finger Biometric Method Using Near Infrared Imaging

In this paper, we propose a new finger biometric method. Infrared finger images are first captured, and then feature extraction is performed using a modified Gaussian high-pass filter through binarization, local binary pattern (LBP), and local derivative pattern (LDP) methods. Infrared finger images include the multimodal features of finger veins and finger geometries. Instead of extracting each feature using different methods, the modified Gaussian high-pass filter is fully convolved. Therefore, the extracted binary patterns of finger images include the multimodal features of veins and finger geometries. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an error rate of 0.13%