Face Sketch Recognition (FSR) presents a severe challenge to conventional recognition paradigms developed basically to match face photos. This challenge is mainly due to the large texture discrepancy between face sketches, characterized by shape exaggeration, and face photos. In this paper, we propose a training-free synthesized face sketch recognition method based on the rank-level fusion of multiple Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics. The advantages of IQA metrics as a recognition engine are combined with the rank-level fusion to boost the final recognition accuracy. By integrating multiple IQA metrics into the face sketch recognition framework, the proposed method simultaneously performs face-sketch matching application and evaluates the performance of face sketch synthesis methods. To test the performance of the recognition framework, five synthesized face sketch methods are used to generate sketches from face photos. We use the Borda count approach to fuse four IQA metrics, namely, structured similarity index metric, feature similarity index metric, visual information fidelity and gradient magnitude similarity deviation at the rank-level. Experimental results and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods illustrate the competitiveness of the proposed synthesized face sketch recognition framework.

Face sketch synthesis (FSS) is considered as an image-to-image translation problem, where a face sketch is generated from an input face photo. FSS plays a vital role in video/image surveillance-based law enforcement. In this paper, motivated by the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), we consider conditional GAN (cGAN) to approach the problem of face sketch synthesis. However, despite the powerful cGAN model’s ability to generate fine textures, low-quality inputs characterized by the facial sketches drawn by artists cannot offer realistic and faithful details and have unknown degradation due to the drawing process, while high-quality references are inaccessible or even unexistent. In this context, we propose an approach based on Generative Reference Prior (GRP) to improve the synthesized face sketch perception. Our proposed model, that we call cGAN-GRP, leverages diverse and rich priors encapsulated in a pre-trained face GAN for generating high-quality facial sketch synthesis. Extensive experiments on publicly available face databases using facial sketch recognition rate and image quality assessment metrics as criteria demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to several state-of-the-art methods.