mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Large-Scale, Time-Synchronized Visible and Thermal Face Dataset

arXiv 2101.02637 ↗First posted 7 Jan 2021cs.CVcited by 23

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Abstract (arXiv)

Thermal face imagery, which captures the naturally emitted heat from the face, is limited in availability compared to face imagery in the visible spectrum. To help address this scarcity of thermal face imagery for research and algorithm development, we present the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory Visible-Thermal Face Dataset (ARL-VTF). With over 500,000 images from 395 subjects, the ARL-VTF dataset represents, to the best of our knowledge, the largest collection of paired visible and thermal face images to date. The data was captured using a modern long wave infrared (LWIR) camera mounted alongside a stereo setup of three visible spectrum cameras. Variability in expressions, pose, and eyewear has been systematically recorded. The dataset has been curated with extensive annotations, metadata, and standardized protocols for evaluation. Furthermore, this paper presents extensive benchmark results and analysis on thermal face landmark detection and thermal-to-visible face verification by evaluating state-of-the-art models on the ARL-VTF dataset.

Key facts. Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2021.

Builds on

13 of 42 references.

References · 13

  1. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  2. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
  3. 2016Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolutioncited by 2,678
  4. 2018Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 809
  5. 2017Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networkscited by 707
  6. 2018Facial Landmark Detection: a Literature Surveycited by 63
  7. 2017UV-GAN: Adversarial Facial UV Map Completion for Pose-invariant Face Recognitioncited by 62
  8. 2017Deep Alignment Network: A convolutional neural network for robust face alignmentcited by 44
  9. 2018Synthesis of High-Quality Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces using Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 24
  10. 2019Polarimetric Thermal to Visible Face Verification via Self-Attention Guided Synthesiscited by 19
  11. 2020Cross-Domain Identification for Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognitioncited by 14
  12. 2017Generative Adversarial Network-based Synthesis of Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Facescited by 11
1 more
  1. 2019Polarimetric Thermal to Visible Face Verification via Attribute Preserved Synthesiscited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 4; 2022: 8; 2023: 4; 2024: 3; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.

23 papers.

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  1. 2022T2V-DDPM: Thermal to Visible Face Translation using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 17
  2. 2022Prepended Domain Transformer: Heterogeneous Face Recognition without Bells and Whistlescited by 16
  3. 2021Simultaneous Face Hallucination and Translation for Thermal to Visible Face Verification using Axial-GANcited by 8
  4. 2021A Synthesis-Based Approach for Thermal-to-Visible Face Verificationcited by 7
  5. 2024T-FAKE: Synthesizing Thermal Images for Facial Landmarkingcited by 7
  6. 2022Beyond the Visible: A Survey on Cross-spectral Face Recognitioncited by 6
  7. 2021Heterogeneous Face Frontalization via Domain Agnostic Learningcited by 4
  8. 2022A Brief Survey on Person Recognition at a Distancecited by 4
  9. 2023When Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN Beats Conditional Diffusioncited by 4
  10. 2023ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillationcited by 3
  11. 2024Template-based Multi-Domain Face Recognitioncited by 3
  12. 2022Learning Domain and Pose Invariance for Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognitioncited by 2
11 more
  1. 2022Thermal to Visible Image Synthesis under Atmospheric Turbulencecited by 1
  2. 2023Vista-Morph: Unsupervised Image Registration of Visible-Thermal Facial Pairscited by 1
  3. 20252D-3D Attention and Entropy for Pose Robust 2D Facial Recognitioncited by 1
  4. 2021Understanding Cross Domain Presentation Attack Detection for Visible Face Recognitioncited by 0
  5. 2022Escaping Data Scarcity for High-Resolution Heterogeneous Face Hallucinationcited by 0
  6. 2022A Novel Fully Annotated Thermal Infrared Face Dataset: Recorded in Various Environment Conditions and Distances From The Cameracited by 0
  7. 2023A Generative Approach for Image Registration of Visible-Thermal (VT) Cancer Facescited by 0
  8. 2024Cross-Spectral Attention for Unsupervised RGB-IR Face Verification and Person Re-identificationcited by 0
  9. 2025LaPIG: Cross-Modal Generation of Paired Thermal and Visible Facial Imagescited by 0
  10. 2025Multi-Attribute guided Thermal Face Image Translation based on Latent Diffusion Modelcited by 0
  11. 2026SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generationcited by 0