I2V-GAN: Unpaired Infrared-to-Visible Video Translation

Human vision is often adversely affected by complex environmental factors, especially in night vision scenarios. Thus, infrared cameras are often leveraged to help enhance the visual effects via detecting infrared radiation in the surrounding environment, but the infrared videos are undesirable due to the lack of detailed semantic information. In such a case, an effective video-to-video translation method from the infrared domain to the visible light counterpart is strongly needed by overcoming the intrinsic huge gap between infrared and visible fields. To address this challenging problem, we propose an infrared-to-visible (I2V) video translation method I2V-GAN to generate fine-grained and spatial-temporal consistent visible light videos by given unpaired infrared videos. Technically, our model capitalizes on three types of constraints: 1) adversarial constraint to generate synthetic frames that are similar to the real ones, 2) cyclic consistency with the introduced perceptual loss for effective content conversion as well as style preservation, and 3) similarity constraints across and within domains to enhance the content and motion consistency in both spatial and temporal spaces at a fine-grained level. Furthermore, the current public available infrared and visible light datasets are mainly used for object detection or tracking, and some are composed of discontinuous images which are not suitable for video tasks. Thus, we provide a new dataset for infrared-to-visible video translation, which is named IRVI. Specifically, it has 12 consecutive video clips of vehicle and monitoring scenes, and both infrared and visible light videos could be apart into 24352 frames. Comprehensive experiments on IRVI validate that I2V-GAN is superior to the compared state-of-the-art methods in the translation of infrared-to-visible videos with higher fluency and finer semantic details. Moreover, additional experimental results on the flower-to-flower dataset indicate I2V-GAN is also applicable to other video translation tasks. The code and IRVI dataset are available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/I2V-GAN.