Infrared face recognition: a literature review
This is a literature review, so it is incremental, summarizing existing research on IR-based face recognition for improving accuracy in real-world scenarios.
The paper reviews infrared (IR) imaging as a promising approach to overcome challenges like illumination, pose, and expression changes in automatic face recognition (AFR), which has practical applications in commercial and law enforcement.
Automatic face recognition (AFR) is an area with immense practical potential which includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and it continues to be one of the most active research areas of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the state-of-the-art in AFR continues to improve, benefiting from advances in a range of different fields including image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics and physiology. However, systems based on visible spectrum images continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly decrease their accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR) imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.