Regional parallel structure based CNN for thermal infrared face identification

The convolutional neural network, based on multi-scale features, is introduced to thermal infrared face identification in this paper. A novel CNN structure is proposed based on characteristics of thermal infrared faces. To enhance and extract inconspicuous thermal infrared facial features for identification, convoluted edges are taken as the initial features. A regional parallel structured CNN algorithm (RPS net) is proposed to obtain multi-scale features based on edge information. Extensive experiments are conducted and analyzed, including statistical test with various classifiers, feature vector property, accuracies of each class and robustness against various noise. The experimental result indicates that RPS net overtakes algorithms based on traditional features (HoG, Fisherface and LBP) and some CNN algorithms (Alex net, VGG net, DeepID net and TFR net), with high quality features. Therefore, RPS net is effective and robust for thermal infrared face identification.