A Face Recognition Algorithm Based on Thermal and Visible Data

In this work we present an algorithm of fusing thermal infrared and visible imagery to identify persons. The proposed face recognition method contains several components. In particular this is rigid body image registration. The rigid registration is achieved by a modified variant of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. We consider an affine transformation in three-dimensional space that preserves the angles between the lines. An algorithm of matching is inspirited by the recent results of neurophysiology of vision. Also we consider the ICP minimizing error metric stage for the case of an arbitrary affine transformation. Our face recognition algorithm also uses the localized-contouring algorithms to segment the subject's face; thermal matching based on partial least squares discriminant analysis. Thermal imagery face recognition methods are advantageous when there is no control over illumination or for detecting disguised faces. The proposed algorithm leads to good matching accuracies for different person recognition scenarios (near infrared, far infrared, thermal infrared, viewed sketch). The performance of the proposed face recognition algorithm in real indoor environments is presented and discussed.