The performance of modern face recognition systems is a function of the dataset on which they are trained. Most datasets are largely biased toward "near-frontal" views with benign lighting conditions, negatively effecting recognition performance on images that do not meet these criteria. The proposed approach demonstrates how a baseline training set can be augmented to increase pose and lighting variability using semi-synthetic images with simulated pose and lighting conditions. The semi-synthetic images are generated using a fast and robust 3-d shape estimation and rendering pipeline which includes the full head and background. Various methods of incorporating the semi-synthetic renderings into the training procedure of a state of the art deep neural network-based recognition system without modifying the structure of the network itself are investigated. Quantitative results are presented on the challenging IJB-A identification dataset using a state of the art recognition pipeline as a baseline.
Face recognition capabilities have recently made extraordinary leaps. Though this progress is at least partially due to ballooning training set sizes – huge numbers of face images downloaded and labeled for identity – it is not clear if the formidable task of collecting so many images is truly necessary. We propose a far more accessible means of increasing training data sizes for face recognition systems: Domain specific data augmentation. We describe novel methods of enriching an existing dataset with important facial appearance variations by manipulating the faces it contains. This synthesis is also used when matching query images represented by standard convolutional neural networks. The effect of training and testing with synthesized images is tested on the LFW and IJB-A (verification and identification) benchmarks and Janus CS2. The performances obtained by our approach match state of the art results reported by systems trained on millions of downloaded images.