TOPLight: Lightweight Neural Networks With Task-Oriented Pretraining for Visible-Infrared Recognition

Visible-infrared recognition (VI recognition) is a challenging task due to the enormous visual difference across heterogeneous images. Most existing works achieve promising results by transfer learning, such as pretraining on the ImageNet, based on advanced neural architectures like ResNet and ViT. However, such methods ignore the negative influence of the pretrained colour prior knowledge, as well as their heavy computational burden makes them hard to deploy in actual scenarios with limited resources. In this paper, we propose a novel task-oriented pretrained lightweight neural network (TOPLight) for VI recognition. Specifically, the TOPLight method simulates the domain conflict and sample variations with the proposed fake domain loss in the pretraining stage, which guides the network to learn how to handle those difficulties, such that a more general modality-shared feature representation is learned for the heterogeneous images. Moreover, an effective fine-grained dependency reconstruction module (FDR) is developed to discover substantial pattern dependencies shared in two modalities. Extensive experiments on VI person re-identification and VI face recognition datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TOPLight, which significantly outperforms the current state of the arts while demanding fewer computational resources.