Fusion of active and passive infrared images for face recognition

This work introduces a new framework for active and passive infrared image fusion for face recognition applications. Two multispectral face recognition databases were used in our experiments: Equinox Database (Visible, SWIR, MWIR, LWIR) and mu-Faces Database (Visible, NIR, MWIR, LWIR). The proposed framework uses a fusion scheme in texture space in order to increase the performance of face recognition. The proposed texture space is based on the use of binary and ternary patterns. A new adaptive ternary pattern is also introduced. Active (SWIR and NIR) and passive (MWIR, LWIR) infrared modalities are used in this fusion scheme. An intra-spectral and inter-spectral fusion approaches are introduced. The obtained results are promising and show an increase in the recognition performance when texture channels are fused in a multi-scale fusion scheme.