mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Beyond the Visible: A Survey on Cross-spectral Face Recognition

arXiv 2201.04435 ↗First posted 12 Jan 2022cs.CVcited by 6

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Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-spectral face recognition (CFR) refers to recognizing individuals using face images stemming from different spectral bands, such as infrared versus visible. While CFR is inherently more challenging than classical face recognition due to significant variation in facial appearance caused by the modality gap, it is useful in many scenarios including night-vision biometrics and detecting presentation attacks. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have resulted in significant improvement in the performance of CFR systems. Given these developments, the contributions of this survey are three-fold. First, we provide an overview of CFR, by formalizing the CFR problem and presenting related applications. Secondly, we discuss the appropriate spectral bands for face recognition and discuss recent CFR methods, placing emphasis on deep neural networks. In particular we describe techniques that have been proposed to extract and compare heterogeneous features emerging from different spectral bands. We also discuss the datasets that have been used for evaluating CFR methods. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future lines of research on this topic.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 149 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2022.

Builds on

47 of 149 references.

References · 47

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35 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

6 papers.

  1. 2025xEdgeFace: Efficient Cross-Spectral Face Recognition for Edge Devicescited by 5
  2. 2025The Invisible Threat: Evaluating the Vulnerability of Cross-Spectral Face Recognition to Presentation Attackscited by 1
  3. 2026Lightweight Cross-Spectral Face Recognition via Contrastive Alignment and Distillationcited by 1
  4. 2026DriveFace: A Cross-Spectral Through-Glass Face Dataset for On-the-Move Vehicular Border Controlcited by 0
  5. 2026MTVDiff: Multimodal Conditional Latent Diffusion for Enhanced Thermal-to-Visible Face Translationcited by 0
  6. 2026SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generationcited by 0