Using infrared to improve face recognition of individuals with highly pigmented skin

Face recognition technology has become commonplace in security and access control applications. However, their performance leaves a lot to be desired when working with highly pigmented skin tones.

The aim of this work is to show how this can be enhanced by incorporating the infrared spectrum, which electronic sensors can perceive.  By augmenting existing datasets with images captured using the visible, infrared and full spectra, the performance of existing state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms can be compared for each of these three spectra.