— This paper introduces the establishment of PolyU Near-Infrared Face Database (PolyU-4 NIRFD) and presents a new coding scheme for face recognition. The PolyU-NIRFD contains images5 from 350 subjects, each contributing about 100 samples with variations of pose, expression, focus,6 scale and time, etc. In total, 35,000 samples were collected in the database. The PolyU-NIRFD7 provides a platform for researchers to develop and evaluate various near-infrared face recognition8 techniques under large scale, controlled and uncontrolled conditions. A new coding scheme, namely9 directional binary code (DBC), is then proposed for near-infrared face recognition. Finally, we10 provide three protocols to evaluate and compare the proposed DBC method with baseline face11 recognition methods, including Gabor based Eigenface, Fisherface and LBP (local binary pattern) on12 the PolyU-NIRFD database. In addition, we also conduct experiments on the visible light band13 FERET database to further validate...