Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition [10, 14, 15, 17], implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors.
This paper designs a high-performance deep convolutional network (DeepID2+) for face recognition. It is learned with the identification-verification supervisory signal. By increasing the dimension of hidden representations and adding supervision to early convolutional layers, DeepID2+ achieves new state-of-the-art on LFW and YouTube Faces benchmarks. Through empirical studies, we have discovered three properties of its deep neural activations critical for the high performance: sparsity, selectiveness and robustness. (1) It is observed that neural activations are moderately sparse. Moderate sparsity maximizes the discriminative power of the deep net as well as the distance between images. It is surprising that DeepID2+ still can achieve high recognition accuracy even after the neural responses are binarized. (2) Its neurons in higher layers are highly selective to identities and identity-related attributes. We can identify different subsets of neurons which are either constantly excited or inhibited when different identities or attributes are present. Although DeepID2+ is not taught to distinguish attributes during training, it has implicitly learned such high-level concepts. (3) It is much more robust to occlusions, although occlusion patterns are not included in the training set. Face images in the wild undergo large intra-personal variations, such as poses, illuminations, occlusions, and low resolutions, which cause great challenges to face-related applications. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a new deep learning framework that can recover the canonical view of face images. It dramatically reduces the intra-person variances, while maintaining the inter-person discriminativeness. Unlike the existing face reconstruction methods that were either evaluated in controlled 2D environment or employed 3D information, our approach directly learns the transformation from the face images with a complex set of variations to their canonical views. At the training stage, to avoid the costly process of labeling canonical-view images from the training set by hand, we have devised a new measurement to automatically select or synthesize a canonical-view image for each identity. As an application, this face recovery approach is used for face verification. Facial features are learned from the recovered canonical-view face images by using a facial component-based convolutional neural network. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the LFW dataset. 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.