Title: Automated thermal face recognition based on minutiae extraction

Authors: Ayan Seal; Suranjan Ganguly; Debotosh Bhattacharjee; Mita Nasipuri; Dipak Kr. Basu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 188, Raja S.C. Mallick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700032, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 188, Raja S.C. Mallick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700032, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 188, Raja S.C. Mallick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700032, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 188, Raja S.C. Mallick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700032, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, 188, Raja S.C. Mallick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata-700032, India

Abstract: In this paper, an efficient approach for human face recognition based on the use of minutiae points in thermal face image is proposed. The thermogram of human face is captured by thermal infra-red camera. Image processing methods are used to pre-process the captured thermogram, from which different physiological features based on blood perfusion data are extracted. Blood perfusion data are related to distribution of blood vessels under the face skin. In the present work, three different methods have been used to get the blood perfusion image, namely bit-plane slicing and medial axis transform, morphological erosion and medial axis transform, sobel edge operators. A five layer feed-forward back propagation neural network is used as the classification tool. It has been found that the first method supercedes the other two producing an accuracy of 97.62% with block size 16×16 for bit-plane 4.

Keywords: thermal physiological features; bit-plane slicing; minutiae points; false acceptance rate; FAR; false rejection rate; face recognition; minutiae extraction; biometrics; thermograms; infra-red cameras; image processing; blood perfusion; neural networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2013.055220

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2013 Vol.2 No.2, pp.133 - 156

Received: 22 Jun 2012
Accepted: 16 Jan 2013

Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

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