A new approach for face recognition by sketches in photos

Face recognition by sketches in photos remains a challenging task. Unlike the existing sketch–photo recognition methods, which convert a photo into sketch and then perform the sketch–photo recognition through sketch–sketch recognition, this paper devotes to synthesizing a photo from the sketch and transforming the sketch–photo recognition to photo–photo recognition to achieve better performance in mixture pattern recognition. The contribution of this paper mainly focuses on two aspects: (1) in view of that there are no many research findings of sketch–photo recognition based on the pseudo-photo synthesis and the existing methods require a large set of training samples, which is nearly impossible to achieve for the high cost of sketch acquisition, we make use of embedded hidden Markov model (EHMM), which can learn the nonlinearity of sketch–photo pair with less training samples, to produce pseudo-photos in terms of sketches; and (2) photos and sketches are divided into patches and pseudo-photo is generated by combining pseudo-photo patches, which makes pseudo-photo more recognizable. Experimental results demonstrate that the newly proposed method is effective to identify face sketches in photo set