Embedded Vision System for Thermal Face Detection Using Deep Learning

Face detection technology is essential for surveillance and security projects; however, algorithms designed to detect faces in color images often struggle in poor lighting conditions. In this paper, we describe the development of an embedded vision system designed to detect human faces by analyzing images captured with thermal infrared sensors, thereby overcoming the limitations imposed by varying illumination conditions. All variants of the Ultralytics YOLOv8 and YOLO11 models were trained on the Terravic Facial IR database and tested on the Charlotte-ThermalFace database; the YOLO11 model achieved slightly higher performance metrics. We compared the performance of two embedded system boards: the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, while running the trained model in inference mode. The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano performed better in terms of inference time. The developed embedded vision system based on these platforms accurately detects faces in thermal images in real-time.