Deep feature representation and ball-tree for face sketch recognition

Forensic face sketch-photo recognition attracts considerable interest in the law enforcement agencies. This paper proposes a new face sketch-photo recognition method based on the VGG deep feature and ball-tree searching algorithm. In this paper, the recognition performances by different feature layers of pretrained VGG-Face model are explored. In addition, to accelerate the matching speed, the ball-tree algorithm is adopted to search the nearest neighbors of query sketches from gallery photos. The experimental results on CUFS and IIIT-D datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with existing algorithms.