Identity-Aware CycleGAN for Face Photo-Sketch Synthesis and Recognition

•Jointly solve synthesis and recognition problem by their close relationship.•Identity-Aware CycleGAN (IACycleGAN) model with a perceptual loss in CycleGAN to supervise the image generation network.•A mutual optimization procedure between the synthesis model and recognition model.•Extensive experiments are performed on both photo-to-sketch and sketch-to-photo tasks using the widely used CUFS and CUFSF databases.