  This paper presents a comparative study of two different methods, which are
based on fusion and polar transformation of visual and thermal images. Here,
investigation is done to handle the challenges of face recognition, which
include pose variations, changes in facial expression, partial occlusions,
variations in illumination, rotation through different angles, change in scale
etc. To overcome these obstacles we have implemented and thoroughly examined
two different fusion techniques through rigorous experimentation. In the first
method log-polar transformation is applied to the fused images obtained after
fusion of visual and thermal images whereas in second method fusion is applied
on log-polar transformed individual visual and thermal images. After this step,
which is thus obtained in one form or another, Principal Component Analysis
(PCA) is applied to reduce dimension of the fused images. Log-polar transformed
images are capable of handling complicacies introduced by scaling and rotation.
The main objective of employing fusion is to produce a fused image that
provides more detailed and reliable information, which is capable to overcome
the drawbacks present in the individual visual and thermal face images.
Finally, those reduced fused images are classified using a multilayer
perceptron neural network. The database used for the experiments conducted here
is Object Tracking and Classification Beyond Visible Spectrum (OTCBVS) database
benchmark thermal and visual face images. The second method has shown better
performance, which is 95.71% (maximum) and on an average 93.81% as correct
recognition rate.
