PTZ camera assisted face acquisition, tracking & recognition

Face recognition systems typically have a rather short operating distance with standoff (distance between the camera and the subject) limited to 1~2 meters. When these systems are used to capture face images at a larger distance (5~10 m), the resulting images contain only a small number of pixels on the face region, resulting in a degradation in face recognition performance. To address this problem, we propose a camera system consisting of one PTZ camera and two static cameras to acquire high resolution face images up to a distance of 10 meters. We propose a novel camera calibration method based on the coaxial configuration between the static and PTZ cameras. We also use a linear prediction model and camera control to mitigate delays in image processing and mechanical camera motion. The proposed system has a larger standoff in face image acquisition and effectiveness in face recognition test. Experimental results on video data collected at a distance ranging from 5 to 10 meters of 20 different subjects as probe and 10,020 subjects as gallery shows 96.4% rank-1 identification accuracy of the proposed method compared to 0.1% rank-1 accuracy of the conventional camera system using a state-of-the-art matcher.