The advent of near infrared imagery and it's applications in face recognition has instigated research in cross spectral (visible to near infrared) matching. Existing research has focused on extracting textural features including variants of histogram of oriented gradients. This paper focuses on studying the effectiveness of these features for cross spectral face recognition. On NIR-VIS-2.0 cross spectral face database, three HOG variants are analyzed along with dimensionality reduction approaches and linear discriminant analysis. The results demonstrate that DSIFT with subspace LDA outperforms a commercial matcher and other HOG variants by at least 15%. We also observe that histogram of oriented gradient features are able to encode similar facial features across spectrums.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation is a widely used approach for topic modeling and it has been successfully applied in several information retrieval applications. In this paper, we introduce this modeling technique for face recognition, by making an analogy between the two domains. We utilize latent Dirichlet allocation to represent facial regions in terms of FaceTopics. Further, linear discriminant analysis is utilized to obtain discriminative FaceTopics which are more suitable for classification tasks. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on the CMU-MultiPIE dataset under illumination and expression variations. The evaluation on over more than 50k images shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Further, the proposed approach shows improved identification results on e-PRIP dataset for matching composite sketches to photos.