Thermalnet: A deep convolutional network for synthetic thermal image generation

Abstract

Deep convolutional neural networks have dramatically changed the landscape of the modern computer vision. Nowadays methods based on deep neural networks show the best performance among image recognition and object detection algorithms. While polishing of network architectures received a lot of scholar attention, from the practical point of view the preparation of a large image dataset for a successful training of a neural network became one of major challenges. This challenge is particularly profound for image recognition in wavelengths lying outside the visible spectrum. For example no infrared or radar image datasets large enough for successful training of a deep neural network are available to date in public domain. Recent advances of deep neural networks prove that they are also capable to do arbitrary image transformations such as super-resolution image generation, grayscale image colorisation and imitation of style of a given artist. Thus a natural question arise: how could be deep neural networks used for augmentation of existing large image datasets? This paper is focused on the development of the Thermalnet deep convolutional neural network for augmentation of existing large visible image datasets with synthetic thermal images. The Thermalnet network architecture is inspired by colorisation deep neural networks.