Classification of Polar-Thermal Eigenfaces using Multilayer Perceptron for Human Face Recognition

This paper presents a novel approach to handle the challenges of face recognition. In this work thermal face images are considered, which minimizes the affect of illumination changes and occlusion due to moustache, beards, adornments etc. The proposed approach registers the training and testing thermal face images in polar coordinate, which is capable to handle complicacies introduced by scaling and rotation. Polar images are projected into eigenspace and finally classified using a multi-layer perceptron. In the experiments we have used Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database benchmark thermal face images. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the verification and identification performance and the success rate is 97.05%.