Thermal imprint feature analysis for face recognition

Recently, vein pattern biometrics has attracted increasing interest from both research and industrial communities. The properties of uniqueness, stability and strong immunity to forgery of the vein patterns would make a potentially good biometric trait offer secure and reliable features for person identity verification. In this paper, a novel approach for personal verification by analyzing the face patterns formed by thermal imaging is presented. A new feature set is proposed to represent the thermal face: the bifurcation points of the thermal pattern and the geographical gravity center of the thermal face region. We proposed to use the Modified Hausdorff Distance to measure the similarity between two feature vectors of the thermal face. The work in this paper shows that the thermal face patterns can provide a reasonable level of discriminating power, and has the potential to be used in the context of biometric applications especially when used in conjunction with other biometric modals.