New AI can recognise faces in the dark

Washington: Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence that can recognise a person's face even in the dark, a development that could lead to enhanced real-time biometrics and post-mission forensic analysis for covert nighttime operations.

The motivations for this technology, developed by researchers from the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), are to enhance both automatic and human-matching capabilities."This technology enables matching between thermal face images and existing biometric face databases/watch lists that only contain visible face imagery," said Benjamin S Riggan, a research scientist at ARL.

Under nighttime and low-light conditions, there is insufficient light for a conventional camera to capture facial imagery for recognition without active illumination such as a flash or spotlight, which would give away the position of such surveillance cameras. Thermal cameras that capture the heat signature naturally emanating from living skin tissue are ideal for such conditions.

The fundamental approach is composed of two key parts: a non-linear regression model that maps a given thermal image into a corresponding visible latent representation and an optimisation problem that projects the latent projection back into the image space.

The architecture used is explicitly designed for visible-based face recognition. The most surprising result is that their approach achieved better verification performance than a generative adversarial network-based approach.