Yaniv Taigman

DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification

In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect => align => represent => classify. We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network. This deep network involves more than 120 million parameters using several locally connected layers without weight sharing, rather than the standard convolutional layers. Thus we trained it on the largest facial dataset to-date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4, 000 identities. The learned representations coupling the accurate model-based alignment with the large facial database generalize remarkably well to faces in unconstrained environments, even with a simple classifier. Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.35% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 27%, closely approaching human-level performance.

Similarity scores based on background samples

Evaluating the similarity of images and their descriptors by employing discriminative learners has proven itself to be an effective face recognition paradigm. In this paper we show how “background samples”, that is, examples which do not belong to any of the classes being learned, may provide a significant performance boost to such face recognition systems. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we define and evaluate the “Two-Shot Similarity” (TSS) score as an extension to the recently proposed “One-Shot Similarity” (OSS) measure. Both these measures utilize background samples to facilitate better recognition rates. Second, we examine the ranking of images most similar to a query image and employ these as a descriptor for that image. Finally, we provide results underscoring the importance of proper face alignment in automatic face recognition systems. These contributions in concert allow us to obtain a success rate of 86.83% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, outperforming current state-of-the-art results.

Effective Unconstrained Face Recognition by Combining Multiple Descriptors and Learned Background Statistics

Computer vision systems have demonstrated considerable improvement in recognizing and verifying faces in digital images. Still, recognizing faces appearing in unconstrained, natural conditions remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present a face-image, pair-matching approach primarily developed and tested on the “Labeled Faces in the Wild” (LFW) benchmark that reflects the challenges of face recognition from unconstrained images. The approach we propose makes the following contributions. 1) We present a family of novel face-image descriptors designed to capture statistics of local patch similarities. 2) We demonstrate how unlabeled background samples may be used to better evaluate image similarities. To this end, we describe a number of novel, effective similarity measures. 3) We show how labeled background samples, when available, may further improve classification performance, by employing a unique pair-matching pipeline. We present state-of-the-art results on the LFW pair-matching benchmarks. In addition, we show our system to be well suited for multilabel face classification (recognition) problem, on both the LFW images and on images from the laboratory controlled multi-PIE database.

Multiple One-Shots for Utilizing Class Label Information.

The One-Shot Similarity (OSS) kernel [3, 4] has recently been introduced as a means of boosting the performance of face recognition systems. Given two vectors, their One-Shot Similarity score (Fig. 1) reflects the likelihood of each vector belonging to the same class as the other vector and not in a class defined by a fixed set of “negative” examples. In this paper we explore how the One-Shot Similarity may nevertheless benefit from the availability of such labels. (a) we present a system utilizing identity and pose information to improve facial image pair-matching performance using multiple One-Shot scores; (b) we show how separating pose and identity may lead to better face recognition rates in unconstrained, “wild” facial images; (c) we explore how far we can get using a single descriptor with different similarity tests as opposed to the popular multiple descriptor approaches; and (d) we demonstrate the benefit of learned metrics for improved One-Shot performance.

The One-Shot similarity kernel

The One-Shot similarity measure has recently been introduced in the context of face recognition where it was used to produce state-of-the-art results. Given two vectors, their One-Shot similarity score reflects the likelihood of each vector belonging in the same class as the other vector and not in a class defined by a fixed set of “negative” examples. The potential of this approach has thus far been largely unexplored. In this paper we analyze the One-Shot score and show that: (1) when using a version of LDA as the underlying classifier, this score is a Conditionally Positive Definite kernel and may be used within kernel-methods (e.g., SVM), (2) it can be efficiently computed, and (3) that it is effective as an underlying mechanism for image representation. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the One-Shot similarity score in a number of applications including multiclass identification and descriptor generation.

Web-scale training for face identification

Scaling machine learning methods to very large datasets has attracted considerable attention in recent years, thanks to easy access to ubiquitous sensing and data from the web. We study face recognition and show that three distinct properties have surprising effects on the transferability of deep convolutional networks (CNN): (1) The bottleneck of the network serves as an important transfer learning regularizer, and (2) in contrast to the common wisdom, performance saturation may exist in CNNs (as the number of training samples grows); we propose a solution for alleviating this by replacing the naive random subsampling of the training set with a bootstrapping process. Moreover, (3) we find a link between the representation norm and the ability to discriminate in a target domain, which sheds lights on how such networks represent faces. Based on these discoveries, we are able to improve face recognition accuracy on the widely used LFW benchmark, both in the verification (1:1) and identification (1:N) protocols, and directly compare, for the first time, with the state of the art Commercially-Off-The-Shelf system and show a sizable leap in performance.