Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognition

For nighttime surveillance, acquisition of visible light imagery is impractical due to the lack of illumination. Thermal imaging, which acquires mid-wave infrared or long-wave infrared radiation naturally emitted by the human body, can be utilized in low-light conditions to perform surveillance tasks. Identification of individuals captured by thermal imaging would significantly enhance nighttime intelligence gathering capabilities. However, government watch lists and databases almost exclusively contain visible-light face imagery of individuals of interest. Matching thermal face imagery to the existing databases therefore requires the development of across-modality face recognition algorithms and methods. Due to the large modality gap caused by the wavelength difference between visible and thermal radiation, thermal-to-visible face recognition is a challenging problem.