SADG: Self-Aligned Dual NIR-VIS Generation for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) has aroused significant interest in recent years, with some challenging tasks such as misalignment problems and limited HFR data. Misalignment occurs among different modalities’ images mainly because of misaligned semantics. Although recent methods have attempted to settle the low-shot problem, they suffer from the misalignment problem between paired near infrared (NIR) and visible (VIS) images. Misalignment can bring performance degradation to most image-to-image translation networks. In this work, we propose a self-aligned dual generation (SADG) architecture for generating semantics-aligned pairwise NIR-VIS images with the same identity, but without the additional guidance of external information learning. Specifically, we propose a self-aligned generator to align the data distributions between two modalities. Then, we present a multiscale patch discriminator to get high quality images. Furthermore, we raise the mean landmark distance (MLD) to test the alignment performance between NIR and VIS images with the same identity. Extensive experiments and an ablation study of SADG on three public datasets show significant alignment performance and recognition results. Specifically, the Rank1 accuracy achieved was close to 99.9% for the CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0, Oulu-CASIA NIR-VIS and BUAA VIS-NIR datasets, respectively.