Sketch-based face alignment for thermal face recognition

In this paper, we present a novel face alignment approach in thermal infrared face recognition. The alignment procedure is based on closest point set matching between sketch faces. Linear combination of positional and local pattern features is embedded in the pointwise distance to solve the local minimum problem for ICP due to edge noise in sketch faces. The comprehensive experiments, including intra-class, inter-class and variable expressions, show the alignment accuracy and face recognition performance results of our algorithm compared to manual labelling, ICP and congealing methods.