Face Tracking and Recognition at a Distance: A Coaxial & Concentric PTZ Camera System

Face recognition has been regarded as an effective method of subject identification at a distance because of its covert and remote sensing capability. However, face images have a low resolution when they are captured at a distance (say, larger than 5 meters) thereby degrading the face matching performance. To address this problem, the authors propose an imaging system consisting of static and PTZ cameras to acquire high resolution face images up to a distance of 12 meters. They propose a novel Coaxial-Concentric camera configuration between the static and PTZ cameras to achieve the distance invariance property using a simple calibration scheme.