Accuracy enhanced thermal face recognition

Abstract

Human face recognition has been generally researched for the last three decades. Face recognition with thermal image has begun to attract significant attention gradually since illumination of environment would not affect the recognition performance. However, the recognition performance of traditional thermal face recognizer is still insufficient in practical application. This study presents a novel thermal face recognizer employing not only thermal features but also critical facial geometric features which would not be influenced by hair style to improve the recognition performance. A three-layer back-propagation feed-forward neural network is applied as the classifier. Traditional thermal face recognizers only use the indirect information of the topography of blood vessels like thermogram as features. To overcome this limitation, the proposed thermal face recognizer can use not only the indirect information but also the direct information of the topography of blood vessels which is unique for every human. Moreover, the recognition performance of the proposed thermal features would not decrease even if the hair of frontal bone varies, the eye blinks or the nose breathes. Experimental results show that the proposed features are significantly more effective than traditional thermal features and the recognition performance of thermal face recognizer is improved.