  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.
