Thermal Infrared Face Recognition: A Review

Abstract

Visible light face recognition has been well researched but still its performance is limited by varying illumination conditions. Illumination conditions are major source of the uncertainty in face recognition systems performance when it is used in outdoor setting. In order to augment the performance of visible light face recognition system's performance, infrared facial images as a new modality has been used in the literature. The other intriguing factor in using the infrared, especially thermal infrared imaging for facial recognition is the night time surveillance with little or no light to illuminate the faces. Thermal facial recognition is used in several covert military applications. The covert data acquisition has its own environmental constraints. The choice of infrared makes the system less dependent on external light sources and more robust with respect to incident angle and light variations. In this paper we focus on reviewing recent developments in thermal IR face recognition and suggest the approaches that could be useful in matching visible and thermal IR images.