Visible-information-aided eyeglasses removing for thermal image reconstruction

Recently, a number of studies have demonstrated that thermal infrared (IR) imagery offers a promising alternative to visible imagery in face recognition problems due to its invariance to visible illumination changes. However, thermal IR has other limitations including that it is opaque to glass. As a result, thermal IR imagery is very sensitive to facial occlusion caused by eyeglasses. Fusion of the visible and thermal IR images is an effective way to solve this problem. In this paper, using the face reconstruction information of the visible images, we propose a nonlinear eyeglasses removing algorithm which can successfully reconstruct the thermal images. Experiments on publicly available data set show the excellent performance of our algorithm.