Cross-Domain Identification for Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognition
This addresses face recognition across different imaging domains (thermal and visible) for security or surveillance applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep feature models.
The paper tackles the problem of thermal-to-visible face recognition by proposing a domain adaptation framework that reduces the need for co-registered and synchronized imagery, achieving competitive performance on a challenging dataset with varying conditions.
Recent advances in domain adaptation, especially those applied to heterogeneous facial recognition, typically rely upon restrictive Euclidean loss functions (e.g., $L_2$ norm) which perform best when images from two different domains (e.g., visible and thermal) are co-registered and temporally synchronized. This paper proposes a novel domain adaptation framework that combines a new feature mapping sub-network with existing deep feature models, which are based on modified network architectures (e.g., VGG16 or Resnet50). This framework is optimized by introducing new cross-domain identity and domain invariance loss functions for thermal-to-visible face recognition, which alleviates the requirement for precisely co-registered and synchronized imagery. We provide extensive analysis of both features and loss functions used, and compare the proposed domain adaptation framework with state-of-the-art feature based domain adaptation models on a difficult dataset containing facial imagery collected at varying ranges, poses, and expressions. Moreover, we analyze the viability of the proposed framework for more challenging tasks, such as non-frontal thermal-to-visible face recognition.