Hyperspectral imaging for skin recognition and biometrics

In this paper, we present a system for automatic spectral signature acquisition and recognition of skin from hyperspectral face imagery. In the acquisition step, hyperspectral cameras are used to capture multispectral or hyperspectral images of faces for skin recognition. The acquired signature may either be stored in a database for future testing or be used for purposes of identification. In the recognition step, the system accounts for variations in the illumination by recovering the light power spectrum in the scene and obtains the scene reflectance by normalising the input image radiance accordingly. Furthermore, incorporated into this system is a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) compact descriptor of spectral reflectance for recognition purposes. We have employed this system as a profiling tool to classify a real-world multispectral face image database into separate ethnic groups.