# Simultaneous Face Hallucination and Translation for Thermal to Visible Face Verification using Axial-GAN

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06068/) (2019)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10703/) (2017)
- [HiFaceGAN: Face Renovation via Collaborative Suppression and Replenishment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05005/) (2020)
- [Super-FAN: Integrated facial landmark localization and super-resolution of real-world low resolution faces in arbitrary poses with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02765/) (2017)
- [Super-Identity Convolutional Neural Network for Face Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02328/) (2018)
- [Wasserstein CNN: Learning Invariant Features for NIR-VIS Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02412/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning-based Face Super-Resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03749/) (2021)
- [Synthesis of High-Quality Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05155/) (2018)
- [A Large-Scale, Time-Synchronized Visible and Thermal Face Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02637/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Disentangled Variational Representation for Heterogeneous Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01936/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Network-based Synthesis of Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02681/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [T2V-DDPM: Thermal to Visible Face Translation using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08814/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MTVDiff: Multimodal Conditional Latent Diffusion for Enhanced Thermal-to-Visible Face Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19886/) (2026)
- [Escaping Data Scarcity for High-Resolution Heterogeneous Face Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16669/) (2022)
- [LaPIG: Cross-Modal Generation of Paired Thermal and Visible Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16376/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing thermal-to-visible face verification approaches expect the thermal and visible face images to be of similar resolution. This is unlikely in real-world long-range surveillance systems, since humans are distant from the cameras. To address this issue, we introduce the task of thermal-to-visible face verification from low-resolution thermal images. Furthermore, we propose Axial-Generative Adversarial Network (Axial-GAN) to synthesize high-resolution visible images for matching. In the proposed approach we augment the GAN framework with axial-attention layers which leverage the recent advances in transformers for modelling long-range dependencies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by evaluating on two different thermal-visible face datasets. When compared to related state-of-the-art works, our results show significant improvements in both image quality and face verification performance, and are also much more efficient.