# DVG-Face: Dual Variational Generation for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09399/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Backdoor Defense Using Shapley Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14889/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Data in Human Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09191/) (2022)
- [SOGAN: 3D-Aware Shadow and Occlusion Robust GAN for Makeup Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10567/) (2021)
- [Dual Spoof Disentanglement Generation for Face Anti-spoofing with Depth Uncertainty Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00568/) (2021)
- [Prepended Domain Transformer: Heterogeneous Face Recognition without Bells and Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06529/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18495/) (2025)
- [MRCN: A Novel Modality Restitution and Compensation Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14626/) (2023)
- [Everything's Talkin': Pareidolia Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03061/) (2021)
- [Versatile Backdoor Attack with Visible, Semantic, Sample-Specific, and Compatible Triggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00816/) (2023)
- [RPG-Palm: Realistic Pseudo-data Generation for Palmprint Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14016/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Attention Network with Dense Field Estimation for Face Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10310/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Visible: A Survey on Cross-spectral Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04435/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous Face Recognition Using Domain Invariant Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14343/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap: Heterogeneous Face Recognition with Conditional Adaptive Instance Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07032/) (2023)
- [xEdgeFace: Efficient Cross-Spectral Face Recognition for Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19646/) (2025)
- [Heterogeneous Face Recognition via Face Synthesis with Identity-Attribute Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04854/) (2022)
- [Modality Agnostic Heterogeneous Face Recognition with Switch Style Modulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08640/) (2024)
- [Physically-Based Face Rendering for NIR-VIS Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06408/) (2022)
- [From Modalities to Styles: Rethinking the Domain Gap in Heterogeneous Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14247/) (2024)
- [Template-based Multi-Domain Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09832/) (2024)
- [Diff-Palm: Realistic Palmprint Generation with Polynomial Creases and Intra-Class Variation Controllable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18312/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Heterogeneous Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15406/) (2026)
- [Joint Feature Distribution Alignment Learning for NIR-VIS and VIS-VIS Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11434/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Domain Gap in Near-infrared Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00627/) (2023)
- [The Invisible Threat: Evaluating the Vulnerability of Cross-Spectral Face Recognition to Presentation Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00380/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Cross-Spectral Face Recognition via Contrastive Alignment and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04769/) (2026)
- [Heterogeneous Visible-Thermal and Visible-Infrared Face Recognition using Unit-Class Loss and Cross-Modality Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14339/) (2021)
- [Styleverse: Towards Identity Stylization across Heterogeneous Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00861/) (2022)
- [Escaping Data Scarcity for High-Resolution Heterogeneous Face Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16669/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) refers to matching cross-domain faces and plays a crucial role in public security. Nevertheless, HFR is confronted with challenges from large domain discrepancy and insufficient heterogeneous data. In this paper, we formulate HFR as a dual generation problem, and tackle it via a novel Dual Variational Generation (DVG-Face) framework. Specifically, a dual variational generator is elaborately designed to learn the joint distribution of paired heterogeneous images. However, the small-scale paired heterogeneous training data may limit the identity diversity of sampling. In order to break through the limitation, we propose to integrate abundant identity information of large-scale visible data into the joint distribution. Furthermore, a pairwise identity preserving loss is imposed on the generated paired heterogeneous images to ensure their identity consistency. As a consequence, massive new diverse paired heterogeneous images with the same identity can be generated from noises. The identity consistency and identity diversity properties allow us to employ these generated images to train the HFR network via a contrastive learning mechanism, yielding both domain-invariant and discriminative embedding features. Concretely, the generated paired heterogeneous images are regarded as positive pairs, and the images obtained from different samplings are considered as negative pairs. Our method achieves superior performances over state-of-the-art methods on seven challenging databases belonging to five HFR tasks, including NIR-VIS, Sketch-Photo, Profile-Frontal Photo, Thermal-VIS, and ID-Camera. The related code will be released at https://github.com/BradyFU.