Improving Face Sketch Recognition via Adversarial Sketch-Photo Transformation

Face sketch-photo transformation has broad applications in forensics, law enforcement, and digital entertainment, particular for face recognition systems that are designed for photo-to-photo matching. While there are a number of methods for face photo-to-sketch transformation, studies on sketch-to-photo transformation remain limited. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional CycleGAN for face sketch-to-photo transformation. Specifically, we leverage the advantages of CycleGAN and conditional GANs and design a feature-level loss to assure the high quality of the generated face photos from sketches. The generated face photos are used, as a replacement of face sketches, and particularly for face identification against a gallery set of mugshot photos. Experimental results on the public-domain database CUFSF show that the proposed approach is able to generate realistic photos from sketches, and the generated photos are instrumental in improving the sketch identification accuracy against a large gallery set.