Thermal infrared colorization via conditional generative adversarial network

Abstract

Transforming a thermal infrared image into a realistic RGB image is a challenging task. In this paper we propose a deep learning method to bridge this gap. We propose learning the transformation mapping using a coarse-to-fine generator that preserves the details. Since the standard mean squared loss cannot penalize the distance between colorized and ground truth images well, we propose a composite loss function that combines content, adversarial, perceptual and total variation losses. The content loss is used to recover global image information while the latter three losses are used to synthesize local realistic textures. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing approaches on the KAIST multispectral pedestrian dataset, achieving more plausible RGB images. Our code is available online22https://github.com/Kuangxd/TICCGAN..