Pseudo Label Association and Prototype-Based Invariant Learning for Semi-Supervised NIR-VIS Face Recognition

Remarkable success of the existing Near-InfraRed and VISible (NIR-VIS) approaches owes to sufficient labeled training data. However, collecting and tagging data from different domains is a time-consuming and expensive task. In this paper, we tackle the NIR-VIS face recognition problem in a semi-supervised manner, termed as semi-supervised NIR-VIS Heterogeneous Face Recognition (NIR-VIS-sHFR). To cope with this problem, we propose a novel pseudo Label association and Prototype-based invariant Learning (LPL), consisting of three key components, i.e., Cross-domain pseudo Label Association (CLA), Intra-domain Compact Representation learning (ICR), and Prototype-based Inter-domain Invariant learning (PII). Firstly, the CLA iteratively builds inter-domain association graphs for pseudo-label association, subsequently facilitating cross-domain model development based on the generated pseudo-labels. Furthermore, the ICR is proposed to achieve the separation of in-domain features from different clusters and the aggregation of features from the same cluster, by performing cluster adaptation learning with prototype-based initialization. Finally, with the cross-domain pseudo-label training data produced by CLA, the PII explores potential domain-invariant and identity-related features, which employs cross-domain prototypes with identity-associated momentum updating to effectively guide inter-domain instances learning. The semi-supervised LPL method achieves comparable performance to recent supervised learning methods on multiple challenging NIR-VIS datasets, which demonstrates that the LPL is capable of learning robust cross-domain representations even without identity label information.