Face photo retrieval by sketch example

Abstract

Face photo-sketch matching has received great attention in recent years due to its vital role in law enforcement. The major challenge of matching face photo and sketch is difference of visual characteristics between face photo and sketch which is referred as modality gap. Earlier approaches have reduced the modality gap by synthesizing face photos and sketches in a same modality (photo or sketch). However, the effectiveness of these approaches is highly affected by synthesis results. That means a poor synthesis might degrade the performance of matching. Therefore, recent works have focused to directly match face photo and sketch of different modalities. However, the features used by these approaches are not robust against modality gap. In this paper, a modality-invariant face descriptor called Gabor Shape is proposed to retrieve face photos based on a probe sketch. Experiments on CUFS and CUFSF datasets show that the new descriptor outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. © 2012 ACM.