Face verification remains a challenging problem in very complex conditions with large variations such as pose, illumination, expression, and occlusions. This problem is exacerbated when we rely unrealistically on a single training data source, which is often insufficient to cover the intrinsically complex face variations. This paper proposes a principled multi-task learning approach based on Discriminative Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model, named GaussianFace, to enrich the diversity of training data. In comparison to existing methods, our model exploits additional data from multiple source-domains to improve the generalization performance of face verification in an unknown target-domain. Importantly, our model can adapt automatically to complex data distributions, and therefore can well capture complex face variations inherent in multiple sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in learning from diverse data sources and generalize to unseen domain. Specifically, the accuracy of our algorithm achieves an impressive accuracy rate of 98.52 on the well-known and challenging Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark. For the first time, the human-level performance in face verification (97.53 ) on LFW is surpassed.
Human and computer performance on face recognition has been compared extensively @cite_52 @cite_20 @cite_21 @cite_36 @cite_37 @cite_8 . These studies have shown that computer-based algorithms were more accurate than humans in well-controlled environments (e.g., frontal view, natural expression, and controlled illumination), whilst still comparable to humans in the poor condition (e.g., frontal view, natural expression, and uncontrolled illumination). However, the above conclusion is only verified on face datasets with controlled variations, where only one factor changes at a time @cite_52 @cite_20 . To date, there has been virtually no work showing that computer-based algorithms could surpass human performance on unconstrained face datasets, such as LFW, which exhibits natural (multifactor) variations in pose, lighting, expression, race, ethnicity, age, gender, clothing, hairstyles, and other parameters.
@cite_37 @cite_8 @cite_36 @cite_21 @cite_52 @cite_20
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We compared face identification by humans and machines using images taken under a variety of uncontrolled illumination conditions in both indoor and outdoor settings. Natural variations in a person's day-to-day appearance (e.g., hair style, facial expression, hats, glasses, etc.) contributed to the difficulty of the task. Both humans and machines matched the identity of people (same or different) in pairs of frontal view face images. The degree of difficulty introduced by photometric and appearance-based variability was estimated using a face recognition algorithm created by fusing three top-performing algorithms from a recent international competition. The algorithm computed similarity scores for a constant set of same-identity and different-identity pairings from multiple images. Image pairs were assigned to good, moderate, and poor accuracy groups by ranking the similarity scores for each identity pairing, and dividing these rankings into three strata. This procedure isolated the role of photometric variables from the effects of the distinctiveness of particular identities. Algorithm performance for these constant identity pairings varied dramatically across the groups. In a series of experiments, humans matched image pairs from the good, moderate, and poor conditions, rating the likelihood that the images were of the same person (1: sure same - 5: sure different). Algorithms were more accurate than humans in the good and moderate conditions, but were comparable to humans in the poor accuracy condition. To date, these are the most variable illumination- and appearance-based recognition conditions on which humans and machines have been compared. The finding that machines were never less accurate than humans on these challenging frontal images suggests that face recognition systems may be ready for applications with comparable difficulty. We speculate that the superiority of algorithms over humans in the less challenging conditions may be due to the algorithms' use of detailed, view-specific identity information. Humans may consider this information less important due to its limited potential for robust generalization in suboptimal viewing conditions. When analysing human activities using data mining or machine learning techniques, it can be useful to infer properties such as the gender or age of the people involved. This paper focuses on the sub-problem of gender recognition, which has been studied extensively in the literature, with two main problems remaining unsolved: how to improve the accuracy on real-world face images, and how to generalise the models to perform well on new datasets. We address these problems by collecting five million weakly labelled face images, and performing three different experiments, investigating: the performance difference between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) of differing depths and a support vector machine approach using local binary pattern features on the same training data, the effect of contextual information on classification accuracy, and the ability of convolutional neural networks and large amounts of training data to generalise to cross-database classification. We report record-breaking results on both the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 98.90 , and the Images of Groups (GROUPS) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.34 for cross-database gender classification. This paper presents a meta-analysis for covariates that affect performance of face recognition algorithms. Our review of the literature found six covariates for which multiple studies reported effects on face recognition performance. These are: age of the person, elapsed time between images, gender of the person, the person's expression, the resolution of the face images, and the race of the person. The results presented are drawn from 25 studies conducted over the past 12 years. There is near complete agreement between all of the studies that older people are easier to recognize than younger people, and recognition performance begins to degrade when images are taken more than a year apart. While individual studies find men or women easier to recognize, there is no consistent gender effect. There is universal agreement that changing expression hurts recognition performance. If forced to compare different expressions, there is still insufficient evidence to conclude that any particular expression is better than another. Higher resolution images improve performance for many modern algorithms. Finally, given the studies summarized here, no clear conclusions can be drawn about whether one racial group is harder or easier to recognize than another. There has been significant progress in improving the performance of computer-based face recognition algorithms over the last decade. Although algorithms have been tested and compared extensively with each other, there has been remarkably little work comparing the accuracy of computer-based face recognition systems with humans. We compared seven state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms with humans on a face-matching task. Humans and algorithms determined whether pairs of face images, taken under different illumination conditions, were pictures of the same person or of different people. Three algorithms surpassed human performance matching face pairs prescreened to be "difficult" and six algorithms surpassed humans on "easy" face pairs. Although illumination variation continues to challenge face recognition algorithms, current algorithms compete favorably with humans. The superior performance of the best algorithms over humans, in light of the absolute performance levels of the algorithms, underscores the need to compare algorithms with the best current control-humans.