A unified framework for thermal face recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified IR face recognition framework that effectively handles multiple extrinsic variability factors such as pose, expression, occlusion, and physiological changes, improving recognition robustness.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive approach capable of simultaneously managing various nuisance factors in IR face recognition.

Findings

Achieves high recognition accuracy under diverse conditions

Handles multiple concurrent extrinsic variations effectively

Outperforms previous ad hoc methods in robustness

Abstract

The reduction of the cost of infrared (IR) cameras in recent years has made IR imaging a highly viable modality for face recognition in practice. A particularly attractive advantage of IR-based over conventional, visible spectrum-based face recognition stems from its invariance to visible illumination. In this paper we argue that the main limitation of previous work on face recognition using IR lies in its ad hoc approach to treating different nuisance factors which affect appearance, prohibiting a unified approach that is capable of handling concurrent changes in multiple (or indeed all) major extrinsic sources of variability, which is needed in practice. We describe the first approach that attempts to achieve this - the framework we propose achieves outstanding recognition performance in the presence of variable (i) pose, (ii) facial expression, (iii) physiological state, (iv) partial occlusion due to eye-wear, and (v) quasi-occlusion due to facial hair growth.