Infrared and visible fusion face recognition based on NSCT domain

Abstract

Visible face recognition systems, being vulnerable to illumination, expression, and pose, can not achieve robust performance in unconstrained situations. Meanwhile, near infrared face images, being light- independent, can avoid or limit the drawbacks of face recognition in visible light, but its main challenges are low resolution and signal noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, near infrared and visible fusion face recognition has become an important direction in the field of unconstrained face recognition research. In this paper, a novel fusion algorithm in non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain is proposed for Infrared and visible face fusion recognition. Firstly, NSCT is used respectively to process the infrared and visible face images, which exploits the image information at multiple scales, orientations, and frequency bands. Then, to exploit the effective discriminant feature and balance the power of high-low frequency band of NSCT coefficients, the local Gabor binary pattern (LGBP) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) are applied respectively in different frequency parts to obtain the robust representation of infrared and visible face images. Finally, the score-level fusion is used to fuse the all the features for final classification. The visible and near infrared face recognition is tested on HITSZ Lab2 visible and near infrared face database. Experiments results show that the proposed method extracts the complementary features of near-infrared and visible-light images and improves the robustness of unconstrained face recognition.