NIR-VIS heterogeneous face recognition via cross-spectral joint dictionary learning and reconstruction

A lot of real-world data is spread across multiple domains. Handling such data has been a challenging task. Heterogeneous face biometrics has begun to receive attention in recent years. In real-world scenarios, many surveillance cameras capture data in the NIR (near infrared) spectrum. However, most datasets accessible to law enforcement have been collected in the VIS (visible light) domain. Thus, there exists a need to match NIR to VIS face images. In this paper, we approach the problem by developing a method to reconstruct VIS images in the NIR domain and vice-versa. This approach is more applicable to real-world scenarios since it does not involve having to project millions of VIS database images into learned common subspace for subsequent matching. We present a cross-spectral joint ℓ₀ minimization based dictionary learning approach to learn a mapping function between the two domains. One can then use the function to reconstruct facial images between the domains. Our method is open set and can reconstruct any face not present in the training data. We present results on the CASIA NIR-VIS v2.0 database and report state-of-the-art results.