Text2Sketch: Learning Face Sketch from Facial Attribute Text

Face sketch is the main approach to find suspect in law enforcement, especially in many cases when facial attribute descriptions of suspects by witnesses are available. Face sketch synthesized from facial attribute text can also be used in sketch based face recognition. While most previous work focus on face photo to sketch synthesis, the problem of sketch synthesis with facial attribute text has not been explored yet. The problem is challenging due to two facts: firstly, no database of face attribute text to sketch is available; secondly, it is hard to synthesize high-quality face sketches due to the ambiguity and complexity of text description. In this paper, we propose a face sketch synthesis approach with text using Stagewise-GAN. Our contributions lie in two aspects: 1) we construct the first text to face sketch database. The database, namely Text2Sketch dataset, is annotated with CUFSF dataset of 1194 sketches. For each sketch, an attribute description is labelled; 2) we synthesize vivid face sketches using Stagewise-GAN. We use user study, face retrieval performance with synthesized sketch, and quantitative results for evaluation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.