Abstract Cross modal face matching between the thermal and visible spectrum is a much desired capability for nighttime surveillance and security applications. Due to a very large modality gap, thermal-to-visible face recognition is one of the most challenging face matching problem. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge this modality gap by a significant margin. Our approach captures the highly non-linear relationship between the two modalities by using a deep neural network. Our model attempts to learn a nonlinear mapping from the visible to the thermal spectrum while preserving the identity information. We show substantive performance improvement on three difficult thermal-visible face datasets. The presented approach improves the state-ofthe-art by more than 10 % on the UND-X1 dataset and by more than 15-30 % on the NVESD dataset in terms of Rank-1 identification. Our method bridges the drop in performance due to the modality gap by more than 40 %.
REF employed deep neural networks to learn a non-linear mapping to bridge the domain gap between thermal and VIS face images.
Deep Perceptual Mapping for Cross-Modal Face Recognition
International Journal of Computer Vision
International Journal of Computer Vision
Computer Science