TFW: Annotated Thermal Faces in the Wild Dataset

Abstract

Face detection and localization of facial landmarks are the primary steps in building many face applications in computer vision. Numerous algorithms and benchmark datasets have been proposed to develop accurate face and facial landmark detection models in the visual domain. However, varying illumination conditions still pose challenging problems. Thermal cameras can address this problem because of their operation in longer wavelengths. However, thermal face detection and localization of facial landmarks in the wild condition are overlooked. The main reason is that most of the existing thermal face datasets have been collected in controlled environments. In addition, many of them contain no annotations of face bounding boxes and facial landmarks. In this work, we present a thermal face dataset with manually labeled bounding boxes and facial landmarks to address these problems. The dataset contains 9,202 images of 145 subjects, collected in both controlled and wild conditions. As a baseline, we trained the YOLOv5 object detection model and its adaptation for face detection, YOLO5Face, on our dataset. To show the efficacy of our dataset, we evaluated these models on the RWTH-Aachen thermal face dataset in addition to our test set. We have made the dataset, source code, and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/IS2AI/TFW to bolster research in thermal face analysis. <br>