Cyclic style generative adversarial network for near infrared and visible light face recognition

Near Infrared and Visible Light (NIR-VIS) face recognition attracts attention from researchers because of its potential for safety, illumination invariance, and stability. Nevertheless, the difference between NIR and VIS domains, the domain gap, remains a huge problem for matching NIR and VIS images. Specifically, for the same identity, the appearance in the NIR domain is different from the VIS domain. Thus, traditional face recognition methods cannot be effective. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel model, called Cyclic-Style GAN (CS-GAN). First, the pre-trained Style-GAN 3 network is embedded into the Cycle-GAN structure for NIR-VIS cross-domain learning. Second, there is a cyclic subspace learning method consisting of latent loss and style loss, through which both style (domain feature) and facial characteristic features are learned to improve the quality of synthesized images. The model synthesizes realistic VIS images from NIR images and does the face recognition task in the VIS domain. The proposed method achieves 99.6% Rank-1 accuracy on the CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0 database which is a state-of-the-art result. The visualization results show that the proposed model synthesizes VIS images with a clear texture of faces and in close-to-reality color.