Thermal to visible face verification is a challenging problem due to the large domain discrepancy between the modalities. Existing approaches either attempt to synthesize visible faces from thermal faces or extract robust features from these modalities for cross-modal matching. In this paper, we take a different approach in which we make use of the attributes extracted from the visible image to synthesize the attribute-preserved visible image from the input thermal image for cross-modal matching. A pre-trained VGG-Face network is used to extract the attributes from the visible image. Then, a novel Attribute Preserved Generative Adversarial Network (AP-GAN) is proposed to synthesize the visible image from the thermal image guided by the extracted attributes. Finally, a deep network is used to extract features from the synthesized image and the input visible image for verification. Extensive experiments on the ARL Polarimetric face dataset show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Unlike the above mentioned traditional methods, synthesis-based thermal to visible face verification algorithms leverage the synthesized visible faces for verification. Due to the success of CNNs and recently introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) in synthesizing realistic images, various deep learning-based approaches have been proposed in the literature for thermal to visible face synthesis @cite_26 @cite_28 @cite_0 @cite_9 . For example, Riggan al @cite_9 proposed a two-step procedure (visible feature estimation and visible image reconstruction) to solve the thermal-visible verification problem. Zhang al @cite_28 proposed an end-to-end GAN-based approach for synthesizing photo-realistic visible face images from their corresponding polarimetric images. Recently Riggan al @cite_26 proposed a new synthesis method to enhance the discriminative quality of generated visible face images by leveraging both global and local facial regions.
@cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_26 @cite_0
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Thermal to visible face verification is a challenging problem due to the large domain discrepancy between the modalities. Existing approaches either attempt to synthesize visible faces from thermal faces or extract robust features from these modalities for cross-modal matching. In this paper, we take a different approach in which we make use of the attributes extracted from the visible image to synthesize the attribute-preserved visible image from the input thermal image for cross-modal matching. A pre-trained VGG-Face network is used to extract the attributes from the visible image. Then, a novel Attribute Preserved Generative Adversarial Network (AP-GAN) is proposed to synthesize the visible image from the thermal image guided by the extracted attributes. Finally, a deep network is used to extract features from the synthesized image and the input visible image for verification. Extensive experiments on the ARL Polarimetric face dataset show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. The large domain discrepancy between faces captured in polarimetric (or conventional) thermal and visible domain makes cross-domain face recognition quite a challenging problem for both human-examiners and computer vision algorithms. Previous approaches utilize a two-step procedure (visible feature estimation and visible image reconstruction) to synthesize the visible image given the corresponding polarimetric thermal image. However, these are regarded as two disjoint steps and hence may hinder the performance of visible face reconstruction. We argue that joint optimization would be a better way to reconstruct more photo-realistic images for both computer vision algorithms and human-examiners to examine. To this end, this paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Network-based Visible Face Synthesis (GAN-VFS) method to synthesize more photo-realistic visible face images from their corresponding polarimetric images. To ensure that the encoded visible-features contain more semantically meaningful information in reconstructing the visible face image, a guidance sub-network is involved into the training procedure. To achieve photo realistic property while preserving discriminative characteristics for the reconstructed outputs, an identity loss combined with the perceptual loss are optimized in the framework. Multiple experiments evaluated on different experimental protocols demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Synthesis of visible spectrum faces from thermal facial imagery is a promising approach for heterogeneous face recognition; enabling existing face recognition software trained on visible imagery to be leveraged, and allowing human analysts to verify cross-spectrum matches more effectively. We propose a new synthesis method to enhance the discriminative quality of synthesized visible face imagery by leveraging both global (e.g., entire face) and local regions (e.g., eyes, nose, and mouth). Here, each region provides (1) an independent representation for the corresponding area, and (2) additional regularization terms, which impact the overall quality of synthesized images. We analyze the effects of using multiple regions to synthesize a visible face image from a thermal face. We demonstrate that our approach improves cross-spectrum verification rates over recently published synthesis approaches. Moreover, using our synthesized imagery, we report the results on facial landmark detection—commonly used for image registration— which is a critical part of the face recognition process. The advance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) enables realistic face image synthesis. However, synthesizing face images that preserve facial identity as well as have high diversity within each identity remains challenging. To address this problem, we present FaceFeat-GAN, a novel generative model that improves both image quality and diversity by using two stages. Unlike existing single-stage models that map random noise to image directly, our two-stage synthesis includes the first stage of diverse feature generation and the second stage of feature-to-image rendering. The competitions between generators and discriminators are carefully designed in both stages with different objective functions. Specially, in the first stage, they compete in the feature domain to synthesize various facial features rather than images. In the second stage, they compete in the image domain to render photo-realistic images that contain high diversity but preserve identity. Extensive experiments show that FaceFeat-GAN generates images that not only retain identity information but also have high diversity and quality, significantly outperforming previous methods.