At the same time, the face detection and tracking problems have become increasingly important as a necessary preprocessing step for face recognition in biometric identification applications. While recent progress has been rapid, face detection is still sometimes the limiting factor in recognition performance.
This thesis will show that these two open problems are related in that new sensors can be a powerful tool in improving face detection and tracking performance. In addition to improving detection and tracking performance by applying new sensors, this research improves the performance of existing algorithms on visible imagery.