Heterogeneous Face Recognition Using Domain Specific Units

The task of Heterogeneous Face Recognition consists in matching face images that are sensed in different domains, such as sketches to photographs (visual spectra images), and thermal images to photographs or near-infrared images to photographs. In this paper, we suggest that the high-level features of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks trained in visual spectra images are potentially domain independent and can be used to encode faces sensed in different image domains. A generic framework for Heterogeneous Face Recognition is proposed by adapting Deep Convolutional Neural Networks low-level features in, so-called, Domain Specific Units. The adaptation using the Domain Specific Units allows the learning of shallow feature detectors specific for each new image domain. Furthermore, it handles its transformation to a generic face space shared between all image domains. Experiments carried out with four different face databases covering three different image domains show substantial improvements, in terms of recognition rate, surpassing the state-of-the-art for most of them. This work is made reproducible: all the source code, scores, and trained models of this approach are made publicly available.