Performance analysis of infrared face recognition using PCA and ZM

Infrared (IR) Face recognition has become an area of growing interest since it can operate in dim light and total darkness. This paper introduces a comparative study between the infrared face recognition systems using the principle component analysis (PCA) and the Zernike moments (ZM) techniques. The performance is evaluated according to the recognition rate, time consumption, and immunity to both Salt & Pepper and Gaussian noise. The analysis shows that the PCA technique has the same performance as the ZM technique if a large size dataset is used. On the other hand, the ZM technique outperforms the PCA technique when using a small size dataset, but it consumes a time approximately equal to four times that required by the PCA technique. The simulations also show that the ZM technique outperforms the PCA technique in the presence of both Salt & Pepper and Gaussian Noise types at various values of noise variance.