Cross-Spectral Face Verification in the Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) Band

Abstract

The problem of face verification across the short wave infrared spectrum (SWIR) is studied in order to illustrate the advantages and limitations of SWIR face verification. The contributions of this work are two-fold. First, a database of 50 subjects is assembled and used to illustrate the challenges associated with the problem. Second, a set of experiments is performed in order to demonstrate the possibility of SWIR cross-spectral matching. Experiments also show that images captured under different SWIR wavelengths can be matched to visible images with promising results. The role of multispectral fusion in improving recognition performance in SWIR images is finally illustrated. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time cross-spectral SWIR face recognition is being investigated in the open literature.