Deep Neural Nets Can Now Recognize Your Face in Thermal Images
July 28th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
One problem with infrared surveillance videos or infrared CCTV images is that it is hard to recognize the people in them. Faces look different in the infrared and matching these images to their normal appearance is a significant unsolved challenge.
The problem is that the link between the way people look in infrared and visible light is highly nonlinear. This is particularly tricky for footage taken in the mid- and far-infrared, which tends to use passive sensors that detect emitted light rather than the reflected variety.
Today, Saquib Sarfraz and Rainer Stiefelhagen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany say they’ve worked out how to connect a mid- or far-infrared image of a face with its visible light counterpart for the first time. The trick they’ve perfected is to teach a neural network to do all the work.
I wonder if a quick spray or a few dabs of micronised zinc sunscreen could throw the IR side of the equation out of whack.