Skin heat transfer model of facial thermograms and its application in face recognition

It has been found that facial thermograms vary with ambient temperature, as well as other internal and external conditions, and result in severe decline in the facial recognition rate. To tackle this problem, a skin heat transfer (SHT) model based on thermal physiology is derived in this paper. The proposed model converts the facial thermograms into blood-perfusion data, which is revealed to reduce the within-class scatter of face images. The advantage of the derived blood-perfusion data over the raw thermograms for recognition is analyzed by the normalized reverse cumulative histogram. It is shown that blood-perfusion data are more consistent in representing facial features. The experiments conducted on both same-session and time-lapse data have further demonstrated that (1) the blood-perfusion data are less sensitive to ambient temperature, physiological and psychological conditions if the human bodies are in the steady state; (2) for time-lapse data, the performance with the blood-perfusion data is nearly identical to that of the same-session data, while the recognition rate with the temperature data dramatically decreases in this case. The major contributions of this work are the well-grounded infrared data preprocessing and the corresponding face recognition system. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.