Thermal face recognition becomes an active research direction in human identification because it does not rely on illumination condition. Face detection and eyeglasses detection are necessary steps prior to face recognition using thermal images. Infrared light cannot go through glasses and thus glasses will appear as dark areas in a thermal image. One possible solution is to detect eyeglasses and to exclude the eyeglasses areas before face matching. In thermal face detection, a projection profile analysis algorithm is proposed, where region growing and morphology operations are used to segment the body of a subject; then the derivatives of two projections (horizontal and vertical) are calculated and analyzed to locate a minimal rectangle of containing the face area. Of course, the searching region of a pair of eyeglasses is within the detected face area. The eyeglasses detection algorithm should produce either a binary mask if eyeglasses present, or an empty set if no eyeglasses at all. In the proposed eyeglasses detection algorithm, block processing, region growing, and priori knowledge (i.e., low mean and variance within glasses areas, the shapes and locations of eyeglasses) are employed. The results of face detection and eyeglasses detection are quantitatively measured and analyzed using the manually defined ground truths (for both face and eyeglasses). Our experimental results shown that the proposed face detection and eyeglasses detection algorithms performed very well in contrast with the predefined ground truths.

Date Published: 2 February 2012
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 8300, Image Processing: Machine Vision Applications V, 83000C (2 February 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.907123

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8300:
Image Processing: Machine Vision Applications V
Philip R. Bingham; Edmund Y. Lam, Editor(s)