| Summary: | Infrared cameras or thermal imaging cameras are devices that use infrared radiation to capture an image. This kind of sensors are being developed for almost a century now. They started to be used in the military environment, but at that time it took too long to create a single image. Nowadays, the infrared sensors have reached a whole new technological level and are used for other than military purposes. These sensors are being used for face detection in this thesis. When comparing the use of thermal images regarding color images, it is possible to see advantages and limitations, such as capture images in total darkness and high price, respectively, which will be explored throughout this document. This work proposes the development or adaptation of several methods for face detection on infrared thermal images. The well known algorithm developed by Paul Viola and Michael Jones, using Haar feature-based cascade classi ers, is used to compare the traditional algorithms developed for visible light images when applied to thermal imaging. Three di erent algorithms for face detection are presented. Face segmentation is the rst step in these methods. A method for the segmentation and ltering of the face in the infrared thermal images resulting in a binary image is proposed. In the rst method, an edge detection algorithm is applied to the binary image and the face detection is based on these contours. In the second method, a template matching method is used for searching and nding the location of a template image with the shape of a human head in the binary image. In the last one, a matching algorithm is used. This algorithm correlates a template with the distance transform of the edge image. This algorithm incorporates edge orientation information resulting in the reduction of false detection and the cost variation is limited. The experimental results show that the proposed methods have promising outcome, but the second method is the most suitable for the performed experiments.
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