mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

When Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN Beats Conditional Diffusion

arXiv 2302.09395 ↗First posted 18 Feb 2023cs.CV cs.AI eess.IVcited by 4

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Thermal facial imagery offers valuable insight into physiological states such as inflammation and stress by detecting emitted radiation in the infrared spectrum, which is unseen in the visible spectra. Telemedicine applications could benefit from thermal imagery, but conventional computers are reliant on RGB cameras and lack thermal sensors. As a result, we propose the Visible-to-Thermal Facial GAN (VTF-GAN) that is specifically designed to generate high-resolution thermal faces by learning both the spatial and frequency domains of facial regions, across spectra. We compare VTF-GAN against several popular GAN baselines and the first conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) for VT face translation (VTF-Diff). Results show that VTF-GAN achieves high quality, crisp, and perceptually realistic thermal faces using a combined set of patch, temperature, perceptual, and Fourier Transform losses, compared to all baselines including diffusion.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 45 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2023.

Builds on

45 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022T2V-DDPM: Thermal to Visible Face Translation using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models19 Sep
  2. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models10 Nov

Other references · 43

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  4. 2014Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognitioncited by 15,267
  5. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
  6. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
  7. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
  8. 2014Conditional Generative Adversarial Netscited by 2,152
  9. 2018Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,618
  10. 2021Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinementcited by 1,506
  11. 2019Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalizationcited by 1,295
  12. 2018ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,250
31 more
  1. 2017StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translationcited by 1,036
  2. 2018Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 795
  3. 2020Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translationcited by 637
  4. 2022MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessmentcited by 514
  5. 2019Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Againcited by 390
  6. 2019Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networkcited by 301
  7. 2017Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translationcited by 295
  8. 2019Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 258
  9. 2018The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GANcited by 234
  10. 2017Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networkscited by 223
  11. 2019Frequency Separation for Real-World Super-Resolutioncited by 115
  12. 2020House-GAN: Relational Generative Adversarial Networks for Graph-constrained House Layout Generationcited by 86
  13. 2020Understanding SSIMcited by 75
  14. 2021Fourier Space Losses for Efficient Perceptual Image Super-Resolutioncited by 72
  15. 2020Cross-Modality Paired-Images Generation for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identificationcited by 71
  16. 2019DeepAtlas: Joint Semi-Supervised Learning of Image Registration and Segmentationcited by 66
  17. 2020Journey Towards Tiny Perceptual Super-Resolutioncited by 27
  18. 2018Synthesis of High-Quality Visible Faces from Polarimetric Thermal Faces using Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 24
  19. 2021A Large-Scale, Time-Synchronized Visible and Thermal Face Datasetcited by 23
  20. 2018Three Dimensional Fluorescence Microscopy Image Synthesis and Segmentationcited by 19
  21. 2021GANs N' Roses: Stable, Controllable, Diverse Image to Image Translation (works for videos too!)cited by 13
  22. 2017TV-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network Based Thermal to Visible Face Recognitioncited by 12
  23. 2020PCSGAN: Perceptual Cyclic-Synthesized Generative Adversarial Networks for Thermal and NIR to Visible Image Transformationcited by 11
  24. 2022A new face database simultaneously acquired in visible, near infrared and thermal spectrumcited by 8
  25. 2019Matching Thermal to Visible Face Images Using a Semantic-Guided Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 7
  26. 2020Unsupervised Image-generation Enhanced Adaptation for Object Detection in Thermal imagescited by 6
  27. 2020The Use of AI for Thermal Emotion Recognition: A Review of Problems and Limitations in Standard Design and Datacited by 6
  28. 2019Cascaded Generation of High-quality Color Visible Face Images from Thermal Capturescited by 3
  29. 2020Multi-Metric Evaluation of Thermal-to-Visual Face Recognitioncited by 2
  30. 2021Investigating Shift-Variance of Convolutional Neural Networks in Ultrasound Image Segmentationcited by 2
  31. 2021Generating Thermal Human Faces for Physiological Assessment Using Thermal Sensor Auxiliary Labelscited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 1.

4 papers.

  1. 2024A Comprehensive Survey on Diffusion Models and Their Applicationscited by 4
  2. 2025CM-Diff: A Single Generative Network for Bidirectional Cross-Modality Translation Diffusion Model Between Infrared and Visible Imagescited by 2
  3. 2023Vista-Morph: Unsupervised Image Registration of Visible-Thermal Facial Pairscited by 1
  4. 2023A Generative Approach for Image Registration of Visible-Thermal (VT) Cancer Facescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Data Generation Scheme for Thermal Modality with Edge-Guided Adversarial Conditional Diffusion Model
  2. 2025F-ViTA: Foundation Model Guided Visible to Thermal Translation
  3. 2026MTVDiff: Multimodal Conditional Latent Diffusion for Enhanced Thermal-to-Visible Face Translation
  4. 2025Multi-Attribute guided Thermal Face Image Translation based on Latent Diffusion Model
  5. 2024Diffusion-driven GAN Inversion for Multi-Modal Face Image Generation
  6. 2024LDFaceNet: Latent Diffusion-based Network for High-Fidelity Deepfake Generation
  7. 2026GAN-Diff : Coupling Pretrained WGAN-GP Features with Conditional Diffusion U-Nets
  8. 2026SynThermFace: Amplifying Limited Paired Data for Visible-Thermal Face Recognition via Synthetic Data Generation