Face identification from low resolution near-infrared images

TLDR: It is shown that learned features contribute considerably to the performance of identification algorithm, and that using both feature level and score level fusion in a hierarchal approach gives good performance.

Abstract: Face identification from low quality and low resolution Near-Infrared (NIR) face images is a challenging problem. Since surveillance cameras typically acquire images at a large standoff distance, the effective resolution of the face is not large enough to identify the individuals. Moreover for a 24-hour surveillance footage, images in low light and at nighttime are acquired in NIR mode which makes the identification problem even more challenging. We propose an effective method using both hand-crafted and learned features for face identification of low resolution NIR images. We show that learned features contribute considerably to the performance of identification algorithm, and that using both feature level and score level fusion in a hierarchal approach gives good performance. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on images which are of low quality, low resolution and acquired under challenging illumination conditions in near-infrared mode by surveillance cameras.