Fusion of visible and infrared imagery for face recognition

In recent years face recognition has received substantial attention, but still remained very challenging in real applications. Despite the variety of approaches and tools studied, face recognition is not accurate or robust enough to be used in uncontrolled environments. Infrared (IR) imagery of human faces offers a promising alternative to visible imagery, however, IR has its own limitations. In this paper, a scheme to fuse information from the two modalities is proposed. The scheme is based on eigenfaces and probabilistic neural network (PNN), using fuzzy integral to fuse the objective evidence supplied by each modality. Recognition rate is used to evaluate the fusion scheme. Experimental results show that the scheme improves recognition performance substantially.