Comparison of visible and infra-red imagery for face recognition

This paper presents initial results in a study comparing the eflectiveness of visible and infra-red ( IR) imagery for detecting and recognizing faces in areas where personnel identification i s critical, (e.g., airports and secure buildings). W e compare the effectiveness of visible versus IR imagery by running three face recognition algorithms on a database of images collected for this study. There are both I R and visible images for each person in the database collected using the same scenarios. W e used three very different feature-extraction and decision-making algorithms for our study to insure that the comparisons would not depend on a particular processing technique. W e also present recognition results when visible and infra-red decision metrics are fused. The recognition results show that both visible and IR imagery perform similarly across algorithms and that fusion of IR and visible imagery is a viable means of enhancing performance beyond that of either acting alone. W e examine the relative importance of different regions of the face for recognition. W e also discuss practical issues of implementation, along with plans for the next phase of the study, face detection in an uncontrolled environment. Preliminary face detection results are presented.