Abstract

In this paper, the face recognitions rate performance using infrared imagery is improved by adding nonuniformity pre-processing techniques. The infrared spectra contains the heat energy emitted by a face and it naturally present an insensitive behavior to variations in illuminations. Infrared imaging system can be formed by a Focal-Plane-Array technology, a group of photodetectors located in the focal plane of an imaging systems, but inherently present the nonuniformity as fixed-pattern noise that degrades the quality of infrared images. Additionally, this nonuniformity slowly varies over time, and depending on the technology used, this drift can take from minutes to hours. Due to this, the face identification performance is degraded over time, requiring a continuous-time calibrations method in order to maintain the face recognition rate using infrared imaging system. In synthesis, this work focuses on the evaluation of the degradation in pattern recognition performance produced by the fixed-pattern noise and the improvement when nonuniformity correction techniques is applied. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.