Reconstructing Face Image from the Thermal Infrared Spectrum to the Visible Spectrum.
During the night or in poorly lit areas, thermal cameras are a better choice instead of normal cameras for security surveillance because they do not rely on illumination. A thermal camera is able to detect a person within its view, but identification from only thermal information is not an easy task. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the face image of a person from the thermal spectrum to the visible spectrum. After the reconstruction, further image processing can be employed, including identification/recognition. Concretely, we propose a two-step thermal-to-visible-spectrum reconstruction method based on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). The reconstruction is done by utilizing the relationship between images in both thermal infrared and visible spectra obtained by CCA. The whole image is processed in the first step while the second step processes patches in an image. Results show that the proposed method gives satisfying results with the two-step approach and outperforms comparative methods in both quality and recognition evaluations.
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. brahmastrok@murase.m.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp.
Brahmastro
B
Kresnaraman
Information Strategy Office, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. ddeguchi@nagoya-u.jp.
Daisuke
D
Deguchi
Faculty of Economics and Information, Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University, 1-38 Naka-Uzura, Gifu 501-6122, Japan. ttakahashi@gifu.shotoku.ac.jp.
Tomokazu
T
Takahashi
School of Engineering, Chukyo University, 101 Tokodachi, Kaizu-cho, Toyota 470-0393, Japan. y-mekada@sist.chukyo-u.ac.jp.
Yoshito
Y
Mekada
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. ide@is.nagoya-u.ac.jp.
Ichiro
I
Ide
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. murase@is.nagoya-u.ac.jp.
Hiroshi
H
Murase
canonical correlation analysis; face image; reconstruction; thermal infrared