IdentiFace: Multi-Modal Iterative Diffusion Framework for Identifiable Suspect Face Generation in Crime Investigations

arXiv cs.CV / 5/4/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces IdentiFace, a diffusion-based framework aimed at generating identifiable suspect faces for use in crime investigations where traditional sketches are low-quality and inefficient.
  • It addresses diffusion model limitations by using a multi-modal input design to improve conditional control and by employing an iterative generation pipeline that allows step-by-step adjustment of identifiable features.
  • The researchers add a facial identity loss function and release two task-specific datasets to support training and evaluation.
  • Experiments on both synthetic data and real-world scenarios show improved performance over existing approaches, particularly for identity retrieval, suggesting practical applicability.
  • The work frames suspect-face generation as not just a text-to-image problem, but one that requires managing ambiguity and sampling variance to maintain identity consistency.

Abstract

Suspect face generation remains a technical challenge in crime investigations. Traditional sketch-drawing workflows suffer from low efficiency and quality, while diffusion-based approaches still face intrinsic limitations on conditional ambiguity for text-to-image models and sampling variance for one-shot generation. We proposed IdentiFace, a novel diffusion-based framework for identifiable suspect face generation, which addressed these issues through (1) multi-modal input design to strengthen conditional control, and (2) an iterative generation pipeline enabling identifiable feature adjustment. We additionally contributed a facial identity loss and two task-specific datasets. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic datasets and in real-world scenarios indicate that IdentiFace achieves superior performance over existing methods, especially in terms of identity retrieval, and shows strong potential for practical applications.