  In this paper, we present a deep coupled framework to address the problem of
matching sketch image against a gallery of mugshots. Face sketches have the
essential in- formation about the spatial topology and geometric details of
faces while missing some important facial attributes such as ethnicity, hair,
eye, and skin color. We propose a cou- pled deep neural network architecture
which utilizes facial attributes in order to improve the sketch-photo
recognition performance. The proposed Attribute-Assisted Deep Con- volutional
Neural Network (AADCNN) method exploits the facial attributes and leverages the
loss functions from the facial attributes identification and face verification
tasks in order to learn rich discriminative features in a common em- bedding
subspace. The facial attribute identification task increases the inter-personal
variations by pushing apart the embedded features extracted from individuals
with differ- ent facial attributes, while the verification task reduces the
intra-personal variations by pulling together all the fea- tures that are
related to one person. The learned discrim- inative features can be well
generalized to new identities not seen in the training data. The proposed
architecture is able to make full use of the sketch and complementary fa- cial
attribute information to train a deep model compared to the conventional
sketch-photo recognition methods. Exten- sive experiments are performed on
composite (E-PRIP) and semi-forensic (IIIT-D semi-forensic) datasets. The
results show the superiority of our method compared to the state- of-the-art
models in sketch-photo recognition algorithms
