Cross-spectrum thermal to visible face recognition based on cascaded image synthesis

Face synthesis from thermal to visible spectrum is fundamental to perform cross-spectrum face recognition as it simplifies its integration in existing commercial face recognition systems and enables manual face verification. In this paper, a new solution based on cascaded refinement networks is proposed. This method generates visible-like colored images of high visual quality without requiring large amounts of training data. By employing a contextual loss function during training, the proposed network is inherently scale and rotation invariant. We discuss the visual perception of the generated visible-like faces in comparison with recent works. We also provide an objective evaluation in terms of cross-spectrum face recognition, where the generated faces were compared against a gallery in visible spectrum using two state-of-the-art deep learning based face recognition systems. When compared to the recently published TV-GAN solution, the performance of the face recognition systems, OpenFace and LightCNN, was improved by a 42.48% (i.e. from 10.76% to 15.37%) and a 71.43% (i.e. from 33.606% to 57.612%), respectively.