SWF-SIFT Approach for Infrared Face Recognition

The scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature descriptor is invariant to image scale and location, and is robust to affine transformations and changes in illumination, so it is a powerful descriptor used in many applications, such as object recognition, video tracking, and gesture recognition. However, in noisy and non-rigid object recognition applications, especially for infrared human face recognition, SIFT-based algorithms may mismatch many feature points. This paper presents a star-styled window filter-SIFT (SWF-SIFT) scheme to improve the infrared human face recognition performance by filtering out incorrect matches. Performance comparisons between the SIFT and SWF-SIFT algorithms show the advantages of the SWF-SIFT algorithm through tests using a typical infrared human face database.