VTF900: A 900-Subject Visible-Thermal Face Recognition Dataset and Benchmark

Jacob Abaare, Bianca Ianetta, Cedric Nimpa Fondje, Shuowen Hu, Benjamin S. Riggan

Despite advancements in visible-thermal face recognition, where thermal probe (query) face images are matched against visible enrollment templates, existing benchmarks are currently limited by small gallery sizes (N $\approx$ 100 subjects). This limitation inhibits the ability to accurately evaluate visible-thermal facial recognition at scale and to report significant recognition performance metrics, which have better operational relevance. Therefore, we introduce VTF900, a large-scale visible-thermal face recognition benchmark with 900 subjects and paired imagery that includes expression, pose, and occlusion variations. VTF900 is designed to support large-scale (i.e., large gallery) evaluations across verification (1:1 matching) and closed-set identification (1:N matching) for visible-thermal face recognition. Furthermore, VTF900 specifically addresses the challenging combination of cross-spectral and cross-dataset analysis. In this paper, after training models on the ARL-VTF dataset, we provide benchmark analyses across convolutional (baseline), vision transformers, and domain-adaptive neural network architectures to assess how these methods scale. At full gallery scale (N =…