Infrared Thermal Imaging Face Recognition Method Based on Temperature Block Feature

In order to prevent COVID-19 effectively, non-contact body temperature measurement and human identification are required in public places, but face recognition based on visible light cannot meet the requirements. Therefore, this paper proposes a thermal imaging face recognition method based on temperature block feature extraction. Histogram equalization and median filter are used to preprocess the face image, and Sobel operator is used for face detection; Six dimensional features including temperature mean, standard deviation and adjacent difference are extracted from each temperature block in the average poolinged temperature matrix, and classified by max-correlation-coefficient method. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of this method is 6.1% higher than that of PCA method with the temperature block size of
$\boldsymbol{2\times 2}$
. When using the same hardware to execute the program, if the two recognition rates are very close, the average test time of the proposed method is 22.2% less than the one of deep learning models such as Alexnet. Furthermore, the proposed method has strong robustness for small training sample set. For example, the recognition rate of single training sample model can reach 0.7, while in the deep learning model, except Mobilenet can reach 0.6, all of the others are less than 0.4.