On the Effect of Atmospheric Turbulence in the Feature Space of Deep Face Recognition

Wes Robbins, Terrance E. Boult; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2022, pp. 1618-1626

When captured over long distances, image quality is degraded by inconsistent refractive indexes in the atmosphere. This effect, known as Atmospheric Turbulence (AT), leads to lower performance for vision-based biometric systems such as face recognition. To account for AT, the literature has proposed methods to restore face-images from atmospheric turbulence, but has limited success. There is still a need to understand how atmospheric turbulence breaks recognition performance. We offer a first-look in this direction by providing a study on the effect of atmospheric turbulence in the feature space of deep-learning-based face recognition. We present results on recognition performance and feature space transformation caused by a wide range of AT levels. In deep feature space, we find interesting phenomena such as increasing feature magnitudes, which contradicts the expected result from the literature. From our results, we are able to identify an effect that makes face recognition under atmospheric turbulence uniquely difficult, which we call feature defection. In total, our findings suggest several areas of available improvement which can be used as a guideline for further progress in building models that are robust to AT.