Heterogeneous Visible-Thermal and Visible-Infrared Face Recognition using Unit-Class Loss and Cross-Modality Discriminator

Visible-to-thermal face image matching is a challenging variate of cross-modality recognition. The challenge lies in the large modality gap and low correlation between visible and thermal modalities. Existing approaches employ image preprocessing, feature extraction, or common subspace projection, which are independent problems in themselves. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for cross-modal face recognition. The proposed algorithm aims to learn identity-discriminative features from unprocessed facial images and identify cross-modal image pairs. A novel Unit-Class Loss is proposed for preserving identity information while discarding modality information. In addition, a Cross-Modality Discriminator block is proposed for integrating image-pair classification capability into the network. The proposed network can be used to extract modality-independent vector representations or a matching-pair classification for test images. Our cross-modality face recognition experiments on five independent databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves marked improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Sejong Face Database: A Multi-Modal Disguise Face Database

Commercial application of facial recognition demands robustness to a variety of challenges such as illumination, occlusion, spoofing, disguise, etc. Disguised face recognition is one of the emerging issues for access control systems, such as security checkpoints at the borders. However, the lack of availability of face databases with a variety of disguise addons limits the development of academic research in the area. In this paper, we present a multimodal disguised face dataset to facilitate the disguised face recognition research. The presented database contains 8 facial add-ons and 7 additional combinations of these add-ons to create a variety of disguised face images. Each facial image is captured in visible, visible plus infrared, infrared, and thermal spectra. Specifically, the database contains 100 subjects divided into subset-A (30 subjects, 1 image per modality) and subset-B (70 subjects, 5 plus images per modality). We also present baseline face detection results performed on the proposed database to provide reference results and compare the performance in different modalities. Qualitative and quantitative analysis is performed to evaluate the challenging nature of disguise addons. The dataset will be publicly available with the acceptance of the research article. The database is available at: https://github.com/usmancheema89/SejongFaceDatabase.