NFRAD: Near-infrared face recognition at a distance

Face recognition at a distance is gaining wide attention in order to augment the surveillance systems with face recognition capability. However, face recognition at a distance in nighttime has not yet received adequate attention considering the increased security threats at nighttime. We introduce a new face image database, called Near-Infrared Face Recognition at a Distance Database (NFRAD-DB). Images in NFRAD-DB are collected at a distance of up to 60 meters with 50 different subjects using a near-infrared camera, a telescope, and near-infrared illuminator. We provide face recognition performance using FaceVACS, DoG-SIFT, and DoG-MLBP representations. The face recognition test consisted of NIR images of these 50 subjects at 60 meters as probe and visible images at 1 meter with additional mug shot images of 10,000 subjects as gallery. Rank-1 identification accuracy of 28 percent was achieved from the proposed method compared to 18 percent rank-1 accuracy of a state of the art face recognition system, FaceVACS. These recognition results are encouraging given this challenging matching problem due to the illumination pattern and insufficient brightness in NFRAD images.