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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02637/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Facial Landmark Detection: a Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05563/) (2018)
- [UV-GAN: Adversarial Facial UV Map Completion for Pose-invariant Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04695/) (2017)
- [Deep Alignment Network: A convolutional neural network for robust face alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01789/) (2017)
- [Synthesis of High-Quality Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05155/) (2018)
- [Polarimetric Thermal to Visible Face Verification via Self-Attention Guided Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07344/) (2019)
- [Cross-Domain Identification for Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08473/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Network-based Synthesis of Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02681/) (2017)
- [Polarimetric Thermal to Visible Face Verification via Attribute Preserved Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00889/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [T2V-DDPM: Thermal to Visible Face Translation using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08814/) (2022)
- [Prepended Domain Transformer: Heterogeneous Face Recognition without Bells and Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06529/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Face Hallucination and Translation for Thermal to Visible Face Verification using Axial-GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06534/) (2021)
- [A Synthesis-Based Approach for Thermal-to-Visible Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09558/) (2021)
- [T-FAKE: Synthesizing Thermal Images for Facial Landmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15127/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Visible: A Survey on Cross-spectral Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04435/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous Face Frontalization via Domain Agnostic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08311/) (2021)
- [A Brief Survey on Person Recognition at a Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08969/) (2022)
- [When Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN Beats Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09395/) (2023)
- [ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01929/) (2023)
- [Template-based Multi-Domain Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09832/) (2024)
- [Learning Domain and Pose Invariance for Thermal-to-Visible Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09350/) (2022)
- [Thermal to Visible Image Synthesis under Atmospheric Turbulence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03057/) (2022)
- [Vista-Morph: Unsupervised Image Registration of Visible-Thermal Facial Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06505/) (2023)
- [2D-3D Attention and Entropy for Pose Robust 2D Facial Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09073/) (2025)
- [Understanding Cross Domain Presentation Attack Detection for Visible Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02548/) (2021)
- [Escaping Data Scarcity for High-Resolution Heterogeneous Face Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16669/) (2022)
- [A Novel Fully Annotated Thermal Infrared Face Dataset: Recorded in Various Environment Conditions and Distances From The Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02093/) (2022)
- [A Generative Approach for Image Registration of Visible-Thermal (VT) Cancer Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12271/) (2023)
- [Cross-Spectral Attention for Unsupervised RGB-IR Face Verification and Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19215/) (2024)
- [LaPIG: Cross-Modal Generation of Paired Thermal and Visible Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16376/) (2025)
- [Multi-Attribute guided Thermal Face Image Translation based on Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21032/) (2025)
- [SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10303/) (2026)

## 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.