Dictionary Alignment With Re-Ranking for Low-Resolution NIR-VIS Face Recognition

Recently, near-infrared (NIR) images are increasingly being captured for recognizing faces in low-light/night-time conditions. Matching these images against the controlled high-resolution visible facial images usually present in the database is a challenging task. In surveillance scenarios, the NIR images can have very low resolution and also non-frontal pose which makes the problem even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal dictionary alignment approach for addressing this problem. We also propose a re-ranking approach to further improve the recognition performance for each probe by combining the rank list given by the proposed algorithm with that given by another complementary feature/algorithm. Finally, we have also collected our own database Heterogeneous face recognition across Pose and Resolution (HPR) that has facial images captured from two surveillance quality NIR cameras and one high-resolution visible camera, with significant variations in head pose and resolution. Extensive experiments on the modified CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0 database, the Surveillance Camera face database, and our HPR database show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and the collected database.