Research On Face Recognition Based On Image Fusion

Human face recognition is very difficult and an important task in the field of pattern recognition,which has widely potential application.However, face recognition based only on the visual light spectrum has shown difficulties in performing consistently under uncontrolled operating conditions.Face recognition accuracy degrades quickly when the lighting is dim or not uniform.The use of infrared(IR) images can improve the performance of face recognition under uncontrolled illumination conditions. But eyeglasses may result in loss of useful information around the eyes in thermal face images since glass material blocks a large portion of thermal energy,which are important features for recognition.This paper studies the methodology of fusion visual light and infrared images for improving the performance of face recognition system.In this paper,a new pixel-level visual light and IR image fusion method in the wavelet domain is proposed for enhancing robustness of face recognition,by exploiting the relatively lower sensitivity of visible imagery to occlusions by eyeglasses.The low frequency coefficient visual light and IR images are combined with weighted averaging and are sharpened.The high frequency coefficient images are double thresholded and then combined, which not only preserves most significant information of original images but also removes the noise and useless details for face recognition.To evaluate and compare the proposed fusion algorithm,four objective fusion image evaluation indices and face recognition rate are used.The face recognition performance is used as final evaluation index.Experiments results show that the proposed fusion algorithm outperforms the traditional image fusion algorithms based on wavelet transform.And Comparison results show that decision fusion-based face recognition techniques outperform individual visual and thermal face recognition.Decision fusion method for face recognition is also investigated in this paper.A prior knowledge about the performance of individual visual light and infrared face recognition is used in the decision fusion process.Experiment results show that face recognition using the proposed decision fusion strategy outperforms individual visual and infrared face recognition.