Colour Fusion in Face Authentication System Based on Visible and Near Infrared Images

Abstract

In this paper, face authentication using images taken in visible and near-infrared spectra (NIR) is studied. Visible images are in RGB colour space and near-infrared images are in gray levels colour space. First, the performance of system in each of the primary colour spaces of visible and near-infrared spectrum is evaluated that the verification process is based on the Normalised Correlation measure within the LDA feature space. In order to utilize the information of colour images, the scores associated to an adaptively selected subset of the colour based classifiers are then fused in the decision level. The selection process is based on a sequential search technique called the "plus L and take away R" algorithm. The sum rule and svm rule is used for fusing the related scores. Our extensive experimental studies using the HFB face database demonstrate that using the proposed method, the performance of the system considerably improves as compared to the individual Visible-based or NIR-based face verification systems.