A Robust Non-cooperative Face Recognition

Scheme from a Distance in Maritime Domain

Biometrics applications are becoming of particular importance in the maritime domain such as informing decisions involved in interception operations and monitoring of watercraft traffic in critical littoral areas of operation. It is of particular interest for Navy to acquire biometrics of persons of interest in small or medium crafts, using self-contained shipboard or patrol vessel mounted systems at operational distances of 20m to 100m. Considering the operational distances of 20m-100m, face recognition becomes a more favorable biometric when compared to iris recognition. There has been considerable work in face recognition area for human recognition at a distance. However, most of the existing face recognition systems require a cooperative individual and often under a controlled environment. While these techniques are much more capable of identifying cooperative subjects, they are almost entirely incapable of identifying non-cooperative subjects for applications such as surveillance, where the observed individuals are non-cooperating and non-habituated. Non-cooperative subjects are people who are either unaware that a biometric system is in place or make no effort to either be recognized or to avoid recognition.

Through this research, we implemented a new multi-people context-based detection and tracking algorithm that can reliably track people and maintain theirs IDs from distance under realistic illumination conditions and with various occlusions. From the detected and tracked human body, we then implemented a new face detection and tracking algorithm using case-based reasoning paradigm. The technique can detect and track multiple faces in real time and under different face poses with significant camera motion. A local patch based facial recognition algorithm is then implemented that can perform robust and real time facial recognition. These techniques were validated extensively under various outdoor conditions, different distances, different camera motions, and different illumination conditions (day and night) for many different subjects. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our methods for non-cooperative face recognition from distance in maritime domain.

Video demos for face detection and tracking may be found here.

Video demos for face detection, tracking, and recognition may be found here.