Recognition in the near infrared spectrum for face, gender and facial expressions

Visible face recognition systems are subjected to failure when recognizing the faces in unconstrained scenarios. So, recognizing faces under variable and low illumination conditions are more important since most of the security breaches happen during night time. Near Infrared (NIR) spectrum enables to acquire high quality images, even without any external source of light and hence it is a good method for solving the problem of illumination. Further, the soft biometric trait, gender classification and non verbal communication, facial expression recognition has also been addressed in the NIR spectrum. In this paper, a method has been proposed to recognize the face along with gender classification and facial expression recognition in NIR spectrum. The proposed method is based on transfer learning and it consists of three core components, i) training with small scale NIR images ii) matching NIR-NIR images (homogeneous) and iii) classification. Training on NIR images produce features using transfer learning which has been pre-trained on large scale VIS face images. Next, matching is performed between NIR-NIR spectrum of both training and testing faces. Then it is classified using three, separate SVM classifiers, one for face recognition, the second one for gender classification and the third one for facial expression recognition. It has been observed that the method gives state-of-the-art accuracy on the publicly available, challenging, benchmark datasets CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0, Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS, PolyU, CBSR, IIT Kh and HITSZ for face recognition. Further, for gender classification the Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS, PolyU,and IIT Kh has been analyzed and for facial expression the Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS dataset has been analyzed.