Identifying tiny faces in thermal images using transfer learning

Abstract

This article focuses on identifying tiny faces in thermal images using transfer learning. Although the issue of identifying faces in images is not new, the problem of tiny face identification is a recently identified research area. Indeed challenging, however, in this paper, we take the problem one step ahead and focus on recognizing tiny faces in thermal images. To do that, we use the paradigm of transfer learning. We use the famous residual network to extract the features in the target domain. Subsequently, with this model as a reference point, we then retrain it in the target domain of thermal images. Through testing performed in Terravic datasets, we have found that the method outperforms existing methods in literature to identify tiny faces in thermal images. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.