The previous work of the authors has shown that physiological
information on the face can be extracted from
thermal infrared imagery and can be used as a biometric.
Although, that work has proved the feasibility of physiological
face recognition, the experimental results revealed
high false acceptance rates due to methodological weaknesses
in the feature extraction and matching algorithms.
This paper, presents a new methodology that corrects these
problems and yields high recognition rates. Specifically, a
post-processing algorithm removes fake vascular contours,
which degraded performance. Also, a new vascular network
matching algorithm copes with deformations caused
by varying facial pose and expressions. First, it estimates
the facial pose in the test image and then calculates the deformation
of the vascular network in the database image.
Next, it registers test and database vascular networks using
a dual bootstrap ICP matching algorithm. Finally, it
computes a matc...