Learning discriminative deep feature embeddings by using million-scale in-the-wild datasets and margin-based softmax loss is the current state-of-the-art approach for face recognition. However, the memory and computing cost of the Fully Connected (FC) layer linearly scales up to the number of identities in the training set. Besides, the largescale training data inevitably suffers from inter-class conflict and long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we propose a sparsely updating variant of the FC layer, named Partial FC (PFC). In each iteration, positive class centers and a random subset of negative class centers are selected to compute the margin-based softmax loss. All class centers are still maintained throughout the whole training process, but only a subset is selected and updated in each iteration. Therefore, the computing requirement, the probability of inter-class conflict, and the frequency of passive update on tail class centers, are dramatically reduced. Extensive experiments across different training data and backbones (e.g. CNN and ViT) confirm the effectiveness, robustness and efficiency of the proposed PFC. The source code is available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Efficient and Robust Training of Face Recognition CNNs by Partial FC

State-of-the-art face recognition models show impressive accuracy, achieving over 99.8% on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. Such models are trained on large-scale datasets that contain millions of real human face images collected from the internet. Web-crawled face images are severely biased (in terms of race, lighting, makeup, etc) and often contain label noise. More importantly, the face images are collected without explicit consent, raising ethical concerns. To avoid such problems, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset for face recognition, obtained by rendering digital faces using a computer graphics pipeline1. We first demonstrate that aggressive data augmentation can significantly reduce the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Having full control over the rendering pipeline, we also study how each attribute (e.g., variation in facial pose, accessories and textures) affects the accuracy. Compared to Syn-Face, a recent method trained on GAN-generated synthetic faces, we reduce the error rate on LFW by 52.5% (accuracy from 91.93% to 96.17%). By fine-tuning the network on a smaller number of real face images that could reason-ably be obtained with consent, we achieve accuracy that is comparable to the methods trained on millions of real face images.

DigiFace-1M: 1 Million Digital Face Images for Face Recognition

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale recognition benchmark, containing uncurated 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name lists and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To our best knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set in the community. Referring to practical deployments, Face Recognition under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a new test set with rich attributes are constructed. Moreover, we gather a large-scale masked face sub-set for biometrics assessment under COVID-19. For a comprehensive evaluation of face matchers, three recognition tasks are performed under standard, masked and unbiased settings, respectively. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. Enabled by WebFace42M, we reduce 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set and rank the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with the public training set. The proposed benchmark shows enormous potential on standard, masked and unbiased face recognition scenarios.

WebFace260M: A Benchmark for Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

Learning discriminative deep feature embeddings by using million-scale in-the-wild datasets and margin-based softmax loss is the current state-of-the-art approach for face recognition. However, the memory and computing cost of the Fully Connected (FC) layer linearly scales up to the number of identities in the training set. Besides, the largescale training data inevitably suffers from inter-class conflict and long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we propose a sparsely updating variant of the FC layer, named Partial FC (PFC). In each iteration, positive class centers and a random subset of negative class centers are selected to compute the margin-based softmax loss. All class centers are still maintained throughout the whole training process, but only a subset is selected and updated in each iteration. Therefore, the computing requirement, the probability of inter-class conflict, and the frequency of passive update on tail class centers, are dramatically reduced. Extensive experiments across different training data and backbones (e.g. CNN and ViT) confirm the effectiveness, robustness and efficiency of the proposed PFC. The source code is available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition. 

/pdf/killing-two-birds-with-one-stone-efficient-and-robust-3rjffkat.pdf

Recently, angular margin-based methods have become the mainstream approach for unconstrained face recognition with remarkable success. However, robust face recognition still remains a challenge, as the face is subject to variations in pose, age, expression, occlusion, and illumination, especially in unconstrained scenarios. Since the training dataset are always collected in unconstrained scenarios, it is inevitable that there’re significant number of hard examples in the training process. In this paper, we design a hard example selection function to effectively identify hard examples in the training procedure with the supervision of angular margin-based losses. Furthermore, a novel Intra-class Hard Example Mining (IHEM) loss function is proposed, which penalizes the cosine distance between the hard examples and their class centers to enhance the discriminative power of face representations. To ensure high performance for face recognition, we combine the supervision of angular margin-based loss and IHEM loss for model training. Specifically, during the training procedure, the angular margin-based loss guarantees the power of feature discrimination for face recognition, while the IHEM loss further encourages the intra-class compactness of hard example. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

IHEM Loss: Intra-Class Hard Example Mining Loss for Robust Face Recognition

Learning discriminative representation using large-scale face datasets in the wild is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains challenging. The difficulties lie in many aspects and this work focus on computing resource constraint and long-tailed class distribution. Recently, classification-based representation learning with deep neural networks and well-designed losses have demonstrated good recognition performance. However, the computing and memory cost linearly scales up to the number of identities (classes) in the training set, and the learning process suffers from unbalanced classes. In this work, we propose a dynamic class queue (DCQ) to tackle these two problems. Specifically, for each iteration during training, a subset of classes for recognition are dynamically selected and their class weights are dynamically generated on-the-fly which are stored in a queue. Since only a subset of classes is selected for each iteration, the computing requirement is reduced. By using a single server without model parallel, we empirically verify in large-scale datasets that 10% of classes are sufficient to achieve similar performance as using all classes. Moreover, the class weights are dynamically generated in a few-shot manner and therefore suitable for tail classes with only a few instances. We show clear improvement over a strong baseline in the largest public dataset Megaface Challenge2 (MF2) which has 672K identities and over 88% of them have less than 10 instances. Code is available at https://github.com/bilylee/DCQ

/pdf/dynamic-class-queue-for-large-scale-face-recognition-in-the-219ro8z2h2.pdf

Dynamic Class Queue for Large Scale Face Recognition In the Wild

Learning discriminative representation using large-scale face datasets in the wild is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains challenging. The difficulties lie in many aspects and this work focus on computing resource constraint and long-tailed class distribution. Recently, classification-based representation learning with deep neural networks and well-designed losses have demonstrated good recognition performance. However, the computing and memory cost linearly scales up to the number of identities (classes) in the training set, and the learning process suffers from unbalanced classes. In this work, we propose a dynamic class queue (DCQ) to tackle these two problems. Specifically, for each iteration during training, a subset of classes for recognition are dynamically selected and their class weights are dynamically generated on-the-fly which are stored in a queue. Since only a subset of classes is selected for each iteration, the computing requirement is reduced. By using a single server without model parallel, we empirically verify in large-scale datasets that 10% of classes are sufficient to achieve similar performance as using all classes. Moreover, the class weights are dynamically generated in a few-shot manner and therefore suitable for tail classes with only a few instances. We show clear improvement over a strong baseline in the largest public dataset Megaface Challenge2 (MF2) which has 672K identities and over 88% of them have less than 10 instances. Code is available at this https URL

A facial landmark localization method is introduced in this paper. It consists of several models that developed on the basis of stacked hourglass network and performs landmark localization from coarse to fine in two stages. The results are fused according to expectation consensus to remove outliers and it can alleviate the problem of inductive bias. We improve the alignment model with weighted heatmaps to get rid of the quantization errors and by applying auto ML to search better network structures under accurate guidance. Besides, the models are trained with face segmentation and a well-designed augmentation scheme. The method achieves the 1st place in the Grand Challenge of 106-point Facial Landmark Localization in ICME2019 with AUC of 84.01%.

Bi Li

Papers

Dynamic Class Queue for Large Scale Face Recognition In the Wild

Dynamic Class Queue for Large Scale Face Recognition In the Wild

Facial Landmark Localization Based on Auto-Stacked Hourglass Network and Expectation Consensus