Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network

Gender recognition of pedestrians in uncontrolled outdoor environments, such as intelligent surveillance scenarios, involves various problems in terms of performance degradation. Most previous studies on gender recognition examined recognition methods involving faces, full body images, or gaits. How...

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Main Authors: Na Rae Baek, Se Woon Cho, Ja Hyung Koo, Kang Ryoung Park
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-10-01
Series:Mathematics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/20/2535
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author Na Rae Baek
Se Woon Cho
Ja Hyung Koo
Kang Ryoung Park
author_facet Na Rae Baek
Se Woon Cho
Ja Hyung Koo
Kang Ryoung Park
author_sort Na Rae Baek
collection DOAJ
description Gender recognition of pedestrians in uncontrolled outdoor environments, such as intelligent surveillance scenarios, involves various problems in terms of performance degradation. Most previous studies on gender recognition examined recognition methods involving faces, full body images, or gaits. However, the recognition performance is degraded in uncontrolled outdoor environments due to various factors, including motion and optical blur, low image resolution, occlusion, pose variation, and changes in lighting. In previous studies, a visible-light image in which image restoration was performed and infrared-light (IR) image, which is robust to the type of clothes, accessories, and lighting changes, were combined to improve recognition performance. However, a near-IR (NIR) image requires a separate NIR camera and NIR illuminator, because of which challenges are faced in providing uniform illumination to the object depending on the distance to the object. A thermal camera, which is also called far-IR (FIR), is not widely used in a surveillance camera environment because of expensive equipment. Therefore, this study proposes an attention-guided GAN for synthesizing infrared image (SI-AGAN) for style transfer of visible-light image to IR image. Gender recognition performance was improved by using only a visible-light camera without an additional IR camera by combining the synthesized IR image obtained by the proposed method with the visible-light image. In the experiments conducted using open databases—RegDB database and SYSU-MM01 database—the equal error rate (EER) of gender recognition of the proposed method in each database was 9.05 and 12.95%, which is higher than that of state-of-the-art methods.
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spelling doaj.art-bf834d6e093643b1a6b61f4ced5cd4712023-11-22T19:01:18ZengMDPI AGMathematics2227-73902021-10-01920253510.3390/math9202535Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial NetworkNa Rae Baek0Se Woon Cho1Ja Hyung Koo2Kang Ryoung Park3Division of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Dongguk University, 30 Pildong-ro 1-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul 04620, KoreaDivision of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Dongguk University, 30 Pildong-ro 1-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul 04620, KoreaDivision of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Dongguk University, 30 Pildong-ro 1-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul 04620, KoreaDivision of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Dongguk University, 30 Pildong-ro 1-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul 04620, KoreaGender recognition of pedestrians in uncontrolled outdoor environments, such as intelligent surveillance scenarios, involves various problems in terms of performance degradation. Most previous studies on gender recognition examined recognition methods involving faces, full body images, or gaits. However, the recognition performance is degraded in uncontrolled outdoor environments due to various factors, including motion and optical blur, low image resolution, occlusion, pose variation, and changes in lighting. In previous studies, a visible-light image in which image restoration was performed and infrared-light (IR) image, which is robust to the type of clothes, accessories, and lighting changes, were combined to improve recognition performance. However, a near-IR (NIR) image requires a separate NIR camera and NIR illuminator, because of which challenges are faced in providing uniform illumination to the object depending on the distance to the object. A thermal camera, which is also called far-IR (FIR), is not widely used in a surveillance camera environment because of expensive equipment. Therefore, this study proposes an attention-guided GAN for synthesizing infrared image (SI-AGAN) for style transfer of visible-light image to IR image. Gender recognition performance was improved by using only a visible-light camera without an additional IR camera by combining the synthesized IR image obtained by the proposed method with the visible-light image. In the experiments conducted using open databases—RegDB database and SYSU-MM01 database—the equal error rate (EER) of gender recognition of the proposed method in each database was 9.05 and 12.95%, which is higher than that of state-of-the-art methods.https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/20/2535gender recognitionvisible-light and IR camerasstyle transfer of visible-light image to IR imageSI-AGAN
spellingShingle Na Rae Baek
Se Woon Cho
Ja Hyung Koo
Kang Ryoung Park
Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
Mathematics
gender recognition
visible-light and IR cameras
style transfer of visible-light image to IR image
SI-AGAN
title Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
title_full Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
title_fullStr Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
title_full_unstemmed Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
title_short Pedestrian Gender Recognition by Style Transfer of Visible-Light Image to Infrared-Light Image Based on an Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network
title_sort pedestrian gender recognition by style transfer of visible light image to infrared light image based on an attention guided generative adversarial network
topic gender recognition
visible-light and IR cameras
style transfer of visible-light image to IR image
SI-AGAN
url https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/20/2535
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