Deep Sketch-Photo Face Recognition Assisted by Facial Attributes

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 information 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 coupled deep neural network architecture which utilizes facial attributes in order to improve the sketch-photo recognition performance. The proposed Attribute-Assisted Deep Convolutional 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 embedding subspace. The facial attribute identification task increases the inter-personal variations by pushing apart the embedded features extracted from individuals with different facial attributes, while the verification task reduces the intra-personal variations by pulling together all the features that are related to one person. The learned discriminative 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 facial attribute information to train a deep model compared to the conventional sketch-photo recognition methods. Extensive 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.