Can I use standard computer vision techniques for images taken in the NIR spectral range? I'm relatively new in Computer Vision and I need some advice with respect to the general possibilities and shortcomings of images taken in the near infrared (NIR) range. I passed a great deal of time researching about that matter but I rather found specific papers in areas like pedestrian detection and face recognition which not completely answered my question.

The background is that I have to chose camera and lens for a stereo-vision system which will be used for object detection tasks.To make the system robust against variations in illumination I thought about the feasibility of employing active illumination with NIR-light and a NIR-bandpass filter. Thus, working exclusively in the NIR spectral range.

I found publications about stereo matching in the far-infrared range, which come to the conclusion that it is not possible to obtain a dense depth field. However, I could not find anything related to the NIR range. It may be because it is too obvious but unfortunately not to me at this point.

Thats why I would like to know in particular:


if it is possible to employ standard stereo matching algorithms like block-matching to images taken in the NIR spectrum and if so would it be possible (of course depending on the conditions) to obtain a dense depth map.
if standard feature detection and description techniques like SIFT, HOG,etc produces similar results in the NIR spectrum.
if a neural network which was trained with visible-light images would be also able to detect an object in an NIR image. (I am aware that this is somehow connected to the prior question)


I would be grateful for any advice, personal experience, book/paper references you may could share with me.

Thank you!
As far as I know, it is a common practice to use regular image processing techniques in this field. In fact I have recently finished a project in this field.


  if it is possible to employ standard stereo matching algorithms like
  block-matching to images taken in the NIR spectrum and if so would it
  be possible (of course depending on the conditions) to obtain a dense
  depth map.


Yes, it is, I think, since NIR images as opposed to Far-Infra red Images has a lot of texture which you probability can (It is very very similar to RED band of the image), as an example people doing these:

repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&amp;context=cis_reports 


  if standard feature detection and description techniques like SIFT, HOG,etc produces similar results in the NIR spectrum.


I think so, since again it has lots of texture and wherever there is texture is corners, edges and all types of  feature points,which you can extract for further porcessing, check this out:

enter link description here

I think you are better to also take a look at reference books such as:

Machine Vision and Advanced Image Processing in Remote Sensing:

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=3642601057

Remote Sensing, Models, and Methods for Image Processing:

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0126289816

Hope you've got your answer.