Inter-modality Image Synthesis and Recognition

Inter-modality image synthesis and recognition has been a hot topic in computer vision. In real-world applications, there are diverse image modalities, such as sketch images for law enforcement and near infrared images for illumination invariant face recognition. Therefore, it is often useful to transform images from a modality to another or match images from different modalities, due to the difficulty of acquiring image data in some modality. These techniques provide large flexibility for computer vision applications.;In this thesis we study three problems: face sketch synthesis, example-based image stylization, and face sketch recognition.;For face sketch synthesis, we expand the frontier to synthesis from uncontrolled face photos. Previous methods only work under well controlled conditions. We propose a robust algorithm for synthesizing a face sketch from a face photo with lighting and pose variations. It synthesizes local sketch patches using a multiscale Markov Random Field (MRF) model. The robustness to lighting and pose variations is achieved with three components: shape priors specific to facial components to reduce artifacts and distortions, patch descriptors and robust metrics for selecting sketch patch candidates, and intensity compatibility and gradient compatibility to match neighboring sketch patches effectively. Experiments on the CUHK face sketch database and celebrity photos collected from the web show that our algorithm significantly improves the performance of the state-of-the-art.;For example-based image stylization, we provide an effective approach of transferring artistic effects from a template image to photos. Most existing methods do not consider the content and style separately. We propose a style transfer algorithm via frequency band decomposition. An image is decomposed into the low-frequency (LF), mid-frequency (MF), and high-frequency (HF) components, which describe the content, main style, and information along the boundaries. Then the style is transferred from the template to the photo in the MF and HF components, which is formulated as MRF optimization. Finally a reconstruction step combines the LF component of the photo and the obtained style information to generate the artistic result. Compared to the other algorithms, our method not only synthesizes the style, but also preserves the image content well. We demonstrate that our approach performs excellently in image stylization and personalized artwork in experiments.;For face sketch recognition, we propose a new direction based on learning face descriptors from data. Recent research has focused on transforming photos and sketches into the same modality for matching or developing advanced classification algorithms to reduce the modality gap between features extracted from photos and sketches. We propose a novel approach by reducing the modality gap at the feature extraction stage. A face descriptor based on coupled information-theoretic encoding is used to capture discriminative local face structures and to effectively match photos and sketches. Guided by maximizing the mutual information between photos and sketches in the quantized feature spaces, the coupled encoding is achieved by the proposed coupled information-theoretic projection forest. Experiments on the largest face sketch database show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.