  Thermal face imagery, which captures the naturally emitted heat from the
face, is limited in availability compared to face imagery in the visible
spectrum. To help address this scarcity of thermal face imagery for research
and algorithm development, we present the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory
Visible-Thermal Face Dataset (ARL-VTF). With over 500,000 images from 395
subjects, the ARL-VTF dataset represents, to the best of our knowledge, the
largest collection of paired visible and thermal face images to date. The data
was captured using a modern long wave infrared (LWIR) camera mounted alongside
a stereo setup of three visible spectrum cameras. Variability in expressions,
pose, and eyewear has been systematically recorded. The dataset has been
curated with extensive annotations, metadata, and standardized protocols for
evaluation. Furthermore, this paper presents extensive benchmark results and
analysis on thermal face landmark detection and thermal-to-visible face
verification by evaluating state-of-the-art models on the ARL-VTF dataset.
