Abstract: Recently,the face recognition of the fusion of visible (VIS) and near infrared (NIR) images has attracted more attention. Here we studied the fast face recognition in this field and gave an applied scheme in detail, which in- eludes three main techniques;down-sampling of the original samples,sparse representation based selection of M-neigh- hors to substitute the original training samples and the weighted decision fusion strategy. Comparing with the classic al- gorithms, the experiments on CSIST face databases show that our scheme can achieve higher classification accuracy with a lower computation load.

Key words: Sparse representation, Visual image, Ncar infrared image, Data fusion, Face recognition