Accuracy enhancement of the viola-jones algorithm for thermal face detection

Face detection is the first step for many facial analysis applications and has been extensively researched in the visible spectrum. While significant progress has been made in the field of face detection in the visible spectrum, the performance of current face detection methods in the thermal infrared spectrum is far from perfect and unable to cope with real-time applications. As the Viola-Jones algorithm has become a common method of face detection, this paper aims to improve the performance of the Viola-Jones algorithm in the thermal spectrum for detecting faces with or without eyeglasses. A performance comparison has been made of three different features, HOG, LBP, and Haar-like, to find the most suitable one for face detection from thermal images. Additionally, to accelerate the detection speed, a pre-processing stage is added in both training and detecting phases. Two pre-processing methods have been tested and compared, together with the three features. It is found that the proposed process for performance enhancement gave higher detection accuracy (95%) than the Viola-Jones method (90%) and doubled the detection speed as well.