A Large-Scale, Time-Synchronized Visible and Thermal Face Dataset
This dataset provides a much-needed resource for researchers and developers working on thermal face recognition and related computer vision tasks, which are currently limited by data availability.
This paper introduces the ARL-VTF dataset, a large-scale collection of over 500,000 paired visible and thermal face images from 395 subjects. It addresses the scarcity of thermal face imagery for research and algorithm development, and includes benchmark results for thermal face landmark detection and thermal-to-visible face verification.
Thermal face imagery, which captures the naturally emitted heat from the face, is limited in availability compared to face imagery in the visible spectrum. To help address this scarcity of thermal face imagery for research and algorithm development, we present the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory Visible-Thermal Face Dataset (ARL-VTF). With over 500,000 images from 395 subjects, the ARL-VTF dataset represents, to the best of our knowledge, the largest collection of paired visible and thermal face images to date. The data was captured using a modern long wave infrared (LWIR) camera mounted alongside a stereo setup of three visible spectrum cameras. Variability in expressions, pose, and eyewear has been systematically recorded. The dataset has been curated with extensive annotations, metadata, and standardized protocols for evaluation. Furthermore, this paper presents extensive benchmark results and analysis on thermal face landmark detection and thermal-to-visible face verification by evaluating state-of-the-art models on the ARL-VTF dataset.