NFRAD: Near-Infrared Face Recognition at a Distance

  • Authors:
  • Hyunju Maeng; Hyun-Cheol Choi; Unsang Park; Seong-Whan Lee;Anil K. Jain

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Eng. Korea Univ., Seoul, Korea;Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Eng. Korea Univ., Seoul, Korea;Dept. of Comp. Sci. & Eng. Michigan State Univ., E. Lansing, USA 48824;Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Eng. Korea Univ., Seoul, Korea;Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Eng. Korea Univ., Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • IJCB '11 Proceedings of the 2011 International Joint Conference on Biometrics
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Face recognition at a distance is gaining wide attention in order to augment the surveillance systems with face recognition capability. However, face recognition at a distance in nighttime has not yet received adequate attention considering the increased security threats at nighttime. We introduce a new face image database, called Near-Infrared Face Recognition at a Distance Database (NFRAD-DB). Images in NFRAD-DB are collected at a distance of up to 60 meters with 50 different subjects using a near-infrared camera, a telescope, and near-infrared illuminator. We provide face recognition performance using FaceVACS, DoG-SIFT, and DoG-MLBP representations. The face recognition test consisted of NIR images of these 50 subjects at 60 meters as probe and visible images at 1 meter with additional mug shot images of 10,000 subjects as gallery. Rank-1 identification accuracy of 28 percent was achieved from the proposed method compared to 18 percent rank-1 accuracy of a state of the art face recognition system, FaceVACS. These recognition results are encouraging given this challenging matching problem due to the illumination pattern and insufficient brightness in NFRAD images.