Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) aims at matching face images across different domains. It is challenging due to the severe domain discrepancies and overfitting caused by small training datasets. Some researchers apply a “recognition via generation” strategy and propose to solve the problem by translating images from a given domain into the visual domain. However, in many HFR tasks such as near-infrablack HFR, there is no paiblack data, which makes it an unsupervised generation. Pose variations, background differences, and many other factors present challenges. Moreover, the generated results lack diversity since many previous works regard this image translation as a “one-to-one” generation task. Considering the information deficiency in the input images, we propose to formulate this image translation process as a “one-to-many” generation problem. Specifically, we introduce reference images to guide the generation process. We propose a memory module to explore the prototypical style patterns of the reference domain. After self-supervised updating, the memory items are attentively aggregated to represent the style information. Moreover, to subtly fuse the contents of input images with the style of reference images, we propose a novel style transformer module. Specifically, we crop the encoded input and reference feature maps into patches, and use the style transformer to establish long-range dependencies between the input and reference patches. Thus, the style of every input patch is transferblack based on those of the most relevant reference patches. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets for various HFR tasks, including NIR-VIS, thermal-VIS, sketch-photo, and gray-RGB, are conducted. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed MMTN are demonstrated both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Recently, many Near infrared-visible (NIR-VIS) heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) methods have been proposed in the community. But it remains a challenging problem because of the sensing gap along with large pose variations. In this paper, we propose an Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination (EGCH) to reduce the domain discrepancy through disentangled representation learning. For each modality, EGCH contains a spectral encoder as well as a structure encoder to disentangle spectral and structure representation, respectively. It also contains a traditional generator that reconstructs the input from the above two representations, and a structure generator that predicts the facial parsing map from the structure representation. Besides, mutual information minimization and maximization are conducted to boost disentanglement and make representations adequately expressed. Then the translation is built on structure representations between two modalities. Provided with the transformed NIR structure representation and original VIS spectral representation, EGCH is capable to produce high-fidelity VIS images that preserve the topology structure of the input NIR while transfer the spectral information of an arbitrary VIS exemplar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more promising results both qualitatively and quantitatively than the state-of-the-art NIR-VIS methods.