The CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0 Face Database

In recent years, heterogeneous face biometrics has attracted more attentions in the face recognition community. After published in 2009, the HFB database has been applied by tens of research groups and widely used for Near infrared vs. Visible light (NIR-VIS) face recognition. Despite its success the HFB database has two disadvantages: a limited number of subjects, lacking specific evaluation protocols. To address these issues we collected the NIR-VIS 2.0 database. It contains 725 subjects, imaged by VIS and NIR cameras in four recording sessions. Because the 3D modality in the HFB database was less used in the literature, we don´t consider it in the current version. In this paper, we describe the composition of the database, evaluation protocols and present the baseline performance of PCA on the database. Moreover, two interesting tricks, the facial symmetry and heterogeneous component analysis (HCA) are also introduced to improve the performance.