Comparison of Thermal and Visual Facial Imagery for use in Sparse Representation based Facial Recognition System

Facial Recognition is probably one of the most commonly used biometric characteristics used by humans for recognition. This is one of the reasons why it has been subject of intense research for the past 30 years or so. In this time a lot of work is being done not only in the development of stable, real time facial recognition system but also in acquiring different modalities of facial imagery for use with these systems. One of the most successful recent attempts at developing a robust real time facial recognition system is based on representing the whole system as an underdetermined sparse linear system and solving it accordingly. On the other hand, the two mostly widely used modalities of facial imagery are Thermal and Visible images. In this paper, we compare the performance of a sparse representation based facial recognition system on both thermal and visible imagery. We also elaborate on the results in detail and explain the performances obtained.