Deep face recognition: A survey

Systems incorporating biometric technologies have become ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental identity management applications. Both cooperative (e.g., access control) and noncooperative (e.g., surveillance and forensics) systems have benefited from biometrics. Such systems rely on the uniqueness of certain biological or behavioral characteristics of human beings, which enable for individuals to be reliably recognized using automated algorithms. Recently, however, there has been a wave of public and academic concerns regarding the existence of systemic bias in automated decision systems (including biometrics). Most prominently, face recognition algorithms have often been labeled as “racist” or “biased” by the media, nongovernmental organizations, and researchers alike. The main contributions of this article are: 1) an overview of the topic of algorithmic bias in the context of biometrics; 2) a comprehensive survey of the existing literature on biometric bias estimation and mitigation; 3) a discussion of the pertinent technical and social matters; and 4) an outline of the remaining challenges and future work items, both from technological and social points of view.

Demographic Bias in Biometrics: A Survey on an Emerging Challenge

Multimodal biometric systems have been widely applied in many real-world applications due to its ability to deal with a number of significant limitations of unimodal biometric systems, including sensitivity to noise, population coverage, intra-class variability, non-universality, and vulnerability to spoofing. In this paper, an efficient and real-time multimodal biometric system is proposed based on building deep learning representations for images of both the right and left irises of a person, and fusing the results obtained using a ranking-level fusion method. The trained deep learning system proposed is called IrisConvNet whose architecture is based on a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Softmax classifier to extract discriminative features from the input image without any domain knowledge where the input image represents the localized iris region and then classify it into one of N classes. In this work, a discriminative CNN training scheme based on a combination of back-propagation algorithm and mini-batch AdaGrad optimization method is proposed for weights updating and learning rate adaptation, respectively. In addition, other training strategies (e.g., dropout method, data augmentation) are also proposed in order to evaluate different CNN architectures. The performance of the proposed system is tested on three public datasets collected under different conditions: SDUMLA-HMT, CASIA-Iris-V3 Interval and IITD iris databases. The results obtained from the proposed system outperform other state-of-the-art of approaches (e.g., Wavelet transform, Scattering transform, Local Binary Pattern and PCA) by achieving a Rank-1 identification rate of 100% on all the employed databases and a recognition time less than one second per person.

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A multi-biometric iris recognition system based on a deep learning approach

This paper details MORPH a longitudinal face database developed for researchers investigating all facets of adult age-progression, e.g. face modeling, photo-realistic animation, face recognition, etc. This database contributes to several active research areas, most notably face recognition, by providing: the largest set of publicly available longitudinal images; longitudinal spans from a few months to over twenty years; and, the inclusion of key physical parameters that affect aging appearance. The direct contribution of this data corpus for face recognition is highlighted in the evaluation of a standard face recognition algorithm, which illustrates the impact that age-progression, has on recognition rates. Assessment of the efficacy of this algorithm is evaluated against the variables of gender and racial origin. This work further concludes that the problem of age-progression on face recognition (FR) is not unique to the algorithm used in this work.

MORPH: A Longitudinal Image Database of Normal Adult Age-Progression.

Face recognition technology has recently become controversial over concerns about possible bias due to accuracy varying based on race or skin tone. We explore three important aspects of face recognition technology related to this controversy. Using two different deep convolutional neural network face matchers, we show that for a fixed decision threshold, the African-American image cohort has a higher false match rate (FMR), and the Caucasian cohort has a higher false nonmatch rate. We present an analysis of the impostor distribution designed to test the premise that darker skin tone causes a higher FMR, and find no clear evidence to support this premise. Finally, we explore how using face recognition for one-to-many identification can have a very low false-negative identification rate and still present concerns related to the false-positive identification rate. Both the ArcFace and VGGFace2 matchers and the MORPH dataset used in our experiments are available to the research community so that others should be able to reproduce or reanalyze our results.

Issues Related to Face Recognition Accuracy Varying Based on Race and Skin Tone

Time lapse, characteristic of aging, is a complex process that affects the reliability and security of biometric face recognition systems. This paper reports the novel use and effectiveness of deep learning, in general, and convolutional neural networks (CNN), in particular, for automatic rather than hand-crafted feature extraction for robust face recognition across time lapse. A CNN architecture using the VGG-Face deep (neural network) learning is found to produce highly discriminative and interoperable features that are robust to aging variations even across a mix of biometric datasets. The features extracted show high inter-class and low intra-class variability leading to low generalization errors on aging datasets using ensembles of subspace discriminant classifiers. The classification results for the all-encompassing authentication methods proposed on the challenging FG-NET and MORPH datasets are competitive with state-of-the-art methods including commercial face recognition engines and are richer in functionality and interoperability than existing methods as it handles mixed biometric datasets, e.g., FG-NET and MORPH.

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Face Recognition across Time Lapse Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Time lapse, characteristic of aging, is a complex process that affects the reliability and security of biometric face recognition systems. Systems and methods use deep learning, in general, and convolutional neural networks (CNN), in particular, for automatic rather than hand-crafted feature extraction for robust face recognition across time lapse. A CNN architecture using the VGG-Face deep (neural network) learning produces highly discriminative and interoperable features that are robust to aging variations even across a mix of biometric datasets. The features extracted show high inter-class and low intra-class variability leading to low generalization errors on aging datasets using ensembles of subspace discriminant classifiers.

Age invariant face recognition using convolutional neural networks and set distances

Human facial appearance is strongly influenced by demographical characteristics such as categorical age, ethnicity, and gender with each category further partitioned into classes-Black, White, Male, Female, Young (18-30), Middle Age (30-50), and Old (50-70)-and groups−mix of classes. Most subjects share a more similar appearance with their own demographic class than with other classes. We evaluate here the accuracy of automatic facial verification for subjects belonging to varying age, ethnicity, and gender categories. Towards that end, we use a convolutional neural network for feature extraction and show that our method yields better performance on individual demographics compared to a commercial face recognition engine. For one-class demographic groups, we corroborate empirical findings that biometric performance on verification is relatively lower for females, young subjects in the 18-30 age group, and blacks. We then expand the scope of our method and evaluate the accuracy of face verification for several multiclass demographic groups. We discuss the results and make suggestions for improving face verification across varying demographics.

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Hachim El Khiyari

Papers

Face Recognition across Time Lapse Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Age invariant face recognition using convolutional neural networks and set distances

Face Verification Subject to Varying (Age, Ethnicity, and Gender)Demographics Using Deep Learning