V2T-GAN: Three-Level Refined Light-Weight GAN with Cascaded Guidance for Visible-to-Thermal Translation

Infrared image simulation is challenging because it is complex to model. To estimate the corresponding infrared image directly from the visible light image, we propose a three-level refined light-weight generative adversarial network with cascaded guidance (V2T-GAN), which can improve the accuracy of the infrared simulation image. V2T-GAN is guided by cascading auxiliary tasks and auxiliary information: the first-level adversarial network uses semantic segmentation as an auxiliary task, focusing on the structural information of the infrared image; the second-level adversarial network uses the grayscale inverted visible image as the auxiliary task to supplement the texture details of the infrared image; the third-level network obtains a sharp and accurate edge by adding auxiliary information of the edge image and a displacement network. Experiments on the public dataset Multispectral Pedestrian Dataset demonstrate that the structure and texture features of the infrared simulation image obtained by V2T-GAN are correct, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in objective metrics and subjective visualization effects.