Object Detection and Classification in the Visible and Infrared Spectrums

The over-arching theme of this dissertation is the development of automated detection and/or classification systems for challenging infrared scenarios. The six works presented herein can be categorized into four problem scenarios. In the first scenario, long-distance detection and classification of vehicles in thermal imagery, a custom convolutional network architecture is proposed for small thermal target detection. For the second scenario, thermal face landmark detection and thermal cross-spectral face verification, a publicly-available visible and thermal face dataset is introduced, along with benchmark results for several landmark detection and face verification algorithms. Furthermore, a novel visible-to-thermal transfer learning algorithm for face landmark detection is presented. The third scenario addresses near-infrared cross-spectral periocular recognition with a coupled conditional generative adversarial network guided by auxiliary synthetic loss functions. Finally, a deep sparse feature selection and fusion is proposed to detect the presence of textured contact lenses prior to near-infrared iris recognition