US army boffins use AI to spot faces in the dark

US army researchers have developed a convolutional neural network and a range of algorithms to recognise faces in the dark. "This technology enables matching between thermal face images and existing biometric face databases or watch lists that only contain visible face imagery," explained Benjamin Riggan on Monday, co-author of the study and an electronics engineer at the US army laboratory. "The technology provides a way for humans to visually compare visible and thermal facial imagery through thermal-to-visible face synthesis." The thermal images are processed and passed to a convolutional neural network to extract facial features using landmarks that mark the corners of the eyes, nose and lips to determine its overall shape. The system, dubbed "multi-region synthesis" is trained with a loss function so that the error between the thermal images and the visible ones is minimized, creating an accurate portrayal of what someone's face looks like despite only glimpsing it in the dark.