Improving cross-modal face recognition using polarimetric imaging.

Abstract

We investigate the performance of polarimetric imaging in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) spectrum for cross-modal face recognition. For this work, polarimetric imagery is generated as stacks of three components: the conventional thermal intensity image (referred to as S0), and the two Stokes images, S1 and S2, which contain combinations of different polarizations. The proposed face recognition algorithm extracts and combines local gradient magnitude and orientation information from S0, S1, and S2 to generate a robust feature set that is well-suited for cross-modal face recognition. Initial results show that polarimetric LWIR-to-visible face recognition achieves an 18% increase in Rank-1 identification rate compared to conventional LWIR-to-visible face recognition. We conclude that a substantial improvement in automatic face recognition performance can be achieved by exploiting the polarization-state of radiance, as compared to using conventional thermal imagery.