Using infrared sensor technology for face recognition and human identification

Recent research has demonstrated distinct advantages using thermal infrared imaging for improving face recognition performance. While conventional video cameras sense reflected light, thermal infrared cameras primarily measure emitted radiation from objects at just above room temperature (e.g., faces). Visible and thermal infrared image data collections of frontal views of faces have been on-going at NIST for over two years producing the most comprehensive database known to involve thermal infrared imagery of human faces. Rigorous experimentation with this database has revealed consistently superior recognition performance of algorithms when applied to thermal infrared particularly under variable illumination conditions. An end-to-end face recognition system incorporating simultaneous coregistered thermal infrared and visible has been developed and tested both indoors and outdoors with good performance.