TV-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network Based Thermal to Visible Face Recognition

This work tackles the face recognition task on images captured using thermal camera sensors which can operate in the non-light environment. While it can greatly increase the scope and benefits of the current security surveillance systems, performing such a task using thermal images is a challenging problem compared to face recognition task in the Visible Light Domain (VLD). This is partly due to the much smaller amount number of thermal imagery data collected compared to the VLD data. Unfortunately, direct application of the existing very strong face recognition models trained using VLD data into the thermal imagery data will not produce a satisfactory performance. This is due to the existence of the domain gap between the thermal and VLD images. To this end, we propose a Thermal-to-Visible Generative Adversarial Network (TV-GAN) that is able to transform thermal face images into their corresponding VLD images whilst maintaining identity information which is sufficient enough for the existing VLD face recognition models to perform recognition. Some examples are presented in Figure 1. Unlike the previous methods, our proposed TV-GAN uses an explicit closed-set face recognition loss to regularize the discriminator network training. This information will then be conveyed into the generator network in the forms of gradient loss. In the experiment, we show that by using this additional explicit regularization for the discriminator network, the TV-GAN is able to preserve more identity information when translating a thermal image of a person which is not seen before by the TV-GAN

Towards a Robust Thermal-Visible Heterogeneous Face Recognition Approach Based on a Cycle Generative Adversarial Network

Security is a sensitive area that concerns all authorities around the world due to the emerging terrorism phenomenon. Contactless biometric technologies such as face recognition have grown in interest for their capacity to identify probe subjects without any human interaction. Since traditional face recognition systems use visible spectrum sensors, their performances decrease rapidly when some visible imaging phenomena occur, mainly illumination changes. Unlike the visible spectrum, Infrared spectra are invariant to light changes, which makes them an alternative solution for face recognition. However, in infrared, the textural information is lost. We aim, in this paper, to benefit from visible and thermal spectra by proposing a new heterogeneous face recognition approach. This approach includes four scientific contributions. The first one is the annotation of a thermal face database, which has been shared via Github with all the scientific community. The second is the proposition of a multi-sensors face detector model based on the last YOLO v3 architecture, able to detect simultaneously faces captured in visible and thermal images. The third contribution takes up the challenge of modality gap reduction between visible and thermal spectra, by applying a new structure of CycleGAN, called TV-CycleGAN, which aims to synthesize visible-like face images from thermal face images. This new thermal-visible synthesis method includes all extreme poses and facial expressions in color space. To show the efficacy and the robustness of the proposed TV-CycleGAN, experiments have been applied on three challenging benchmark databases, including different real-world scenarios: TUFTS and its aligned version, NVIE and PUJ. The qualitative evaluation shows that our method generates more realistic faces. The quantitative one demonstrates that the proposed TV -CycleGAN gives the best improvement on face recognition rates. Therefore, instead of applying a direct matching from thermal to visible images which allows a recognition rate of 47,06% for TUFTS Database, a proposed TV-CycleGAN ensures accuracy of 57,56% for the same database. It contributes to a rate enhancement of 29,16%, and 15,71% for NVIE and PUJ databases, respectively. It reaches an accuracy enhancement of 18,5% for the aligned TUFTS database. It also outperforms some recent state of the art methods in terms of F1-Score, AUC/EER and other evaluation metrics. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that the obtained visible synthesized face images using TV-CycleGAN method are very promising for thermal facial landmark detection as a fourth contribution of this paper

Multimodal Adversarial Learning

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have proven to be an exceptional tool for object recognition, generative modelling, and multi-modal learning in various computer vision applications. However, recent findings have shown that such state-of-the-art models can be easily deceived by inserting slight imperceptible perturbations to key pixels in the input. A good target detection systems can accurately identify targets by localizing their coordinates on the input image of interest. This is ideally achieved by labeling each pixel in an image as a background or a potential target pixel. However, prior research still confirms that such state of the art targets models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In the case of generative models, facial sketches drawn by artists mostly used by law enforcement agencies depend on the ability of the artist to clearly replicate all the key facial features that aid in capturing the true identity of a subject. Recent works have attempted to synthesize these sketches into plausible visual images to improve visual recognition and identification. However, synthesizing photo-realistic images from sketches proves to be an even more challenging task, especially for sensitive applications such as suspect identification. However, the incorporation of hybrid discriminators, which perform attribute classification of multiple target attributes, a quality guided encoder that minimizes the perceptual dissimilarity of the latent space embedding of the synthesized and real image at different layers in the network have shown to be powerful tools towards better multi modal learning techniques. In general, our overall approach was aimed at improving target detection systems and the visual appeal of synthesized images while incorporating multiple attribute assignment to the generator without compromising the identity of the synthesized image. We synthesized sketches using XDOG filter for the CelebA, Multi-modal and CelebA-HQ datasets and from an auxiliary generator trained on sketches from CUHK, IIT-D and FERET datasets. Our results overall for different model applications are impressive compared to current state of the art