State-of-the-art face recognition networks are often computationally expensive and cannot be used for mobile applications. Training lightweight face recognition models also requires large identity-labeled datasets. Meanwhile, there are privacy and ethical concerns with collecting and using large face recognition datasets. While generating synthetic datasets for training face recognition models is an alternative option, it is challenging to generate synthetic data with sufficient intra-class variations. In addition, there is still a considerable gap between the performance of models trained on real and synthetic data. In this paper, we propose a new framework (named SynthDistill) to train lightweight face recognition models by distilling the knowledge of a pretrained teacher face recognition model using synthetic data. We use a pretrained face generator network to generate synthetic face images and use the synthesized images to learn a lightweight student network. We use synthetic face images without identity labels, mitigating the problems in the intra-class variation generation of synthetic datasets. Instead, we propose a novel dynamic sampling strategy from the intermediate latent space of the face generator network to include new variations of the challenging images while further exploring new face images in the training batch. The results on five different face recognition datasets demonstrate the superiority of our lightweight model compared to models trained on previous synthetic datasets, achieving a verification accuracy of 99.52% on the LFW dataset with a lightweight network. The results also show that our proposed framework significantly reduces the gap between training with real and synthetic data. The source code for replicating the experiments is publicly released.
This paper presents the summary of the Efficient Face Recognition Competition (EFaR) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition received 17 submissions from 6 different teams. To drive further development of efficient face recognition models, the submitted solutions are ranked based on a weighted score of the achieved verification accuracies on a diverse set of benchmarks, as well as the deployability given by the number of floating-point operations and model size. The evaluation of submissions is extended to bias, cross-quality, and large-scale recognition benchmarks. Overall, the paper gives an overview of the achieved performance values of the submitted solutions as well as a diverse set of baselines. The submitted solutions use small, efficient network architectures to reduce the computational cost, some solutions apply model quantization. An outlook on possible techniques that are underrepresented in current solutions is given as well.
In this paper, we present EdgeFace, a lightweight and efficient face recognition network inspired by the hybrid architecture of EdgeNeXt. By effectively combining the strengths of both CNN and Transformer models, and a low rank linear layer, EdgeFace achieves excellent face recognition performance optimized for edge devices. The proposed EdgeFace network not only maintains low computational costs and compact storage, but also achieves high face recognition accuracy, making it suitable for deployment on edge devices. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark face datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of EdgeFace in comparison to state-of-the-art lightweight models and deep face recognition models. Our EdgeFace model with 1.77M parameters achieves state of the art results on LFW (99.73%), IJB-B (92.67%), and IJB-C (94.85%), outperforming other efficient models with larger computational complexities. The code to replicate the experiments will be made available publicly.
Deep learning-based face recognition models follow the common trend in deep neural networks by utilizing full-precision floating-point networks with high computational costs. Deploying such networks in use-cases constrained by computational requirements is often infeasible due to the large memory required by the full-precision model. Previous compact face recognition approaches proposed to design special compact architectures and train them from scratch using real training data, which may not be available in a real-world scenario due to privacy concerns. We present in this work the QuantFace solution based on low-bit precision format model quantization. QuantFace reduces the required computational cost of the existing face recognition models without the need for designing a particular architecture or accessing real training data. QuantFace introduces privacy-friendly synthetic face data to the quantization process to mitigate potential privacy concerns and issues related to the accessibility to real training data. Through extensive evaluation experiments on seven benchmarks and four network architectures, we demonstrate that QuantFace can successfully reduce the model size up to 5x while maintaining, to a large degree, the verification performance of the full-precision model without accessing real training datasets.
Deep neural networks have rapidly become the mainstream method for face recognition (FR). However, this limits the deployment of such models that contain an extremely large number of parameters to embedded and low-end devices. In this work, we present an extremely lightweight and accurate FR solution, namely PocketNet. We utilize neural architecture search to develop a new family of lightweight face-specific architectures. We additionally propose a novel training paradigm based on knowledge distillation (KD), the multi-step KD, where the knowledge is distilled from the teacher model to the student model at different stages of the training maturity. We conduct a detailed ablation study proving both, the sanity of using NAS for the specific task of FR rather than general object classification, and the benefits of our proposed multi-step KD. We present an extensive experimental evaluation and comparisons with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) compact FR models on nine different benchmarks including large-scale evaluation benchmarks such as IJB-B, IJB-C, and MegaFace. PocketNets have consistently advanced the SOTA FR performance on nine mainstream benchmarks when considering the same level of model compactness. With 0.92M parameters, our smallest network PocketNetS-128 achieved very competitive results to recent SOTA compacted models that contain up to 4M parameters.
In this paper, we present a set of extremely efficient and high throughput models for accurate face verification, MixFaceNets which are inspired by Mixed Depthwise Convolutional Kernels. Extensive experiment evaluations on Label Face in the Wild (LFW), Age-DB, MegaFace, and IARPA Janus Benchmarks IJB-B and IJB-C datasets have shown the effectiveness of our MixFaceNets for applications requiring extremely low computational complexity. Under the same level of computation complexity (< 500M FLOPs), our MixFaceNets outperform MobileFaceNets on all the evaluated datasets, achieving 99.60% accuracy on LFW, 97.05% accuracy on AgeDB-30, 93.60 TAR (at FAR1e-6) on MegaFace, 90.94 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-B and 93.08 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-C. With computational complexity between 500M and 1G FLOPs, our MixFaceNets achieved results comparable to the top-ranked models, while using significantly fewer FLOPs and less computation overhead, which proves the practical value of our proposed MixFaceNets. All training codes, pre-trained models, and training logs have been made available https://github.com/fdbtrs/mixfacenets.
To improve the discriminative and generalization ability of lightweight network for face recognition, we propose an efficient variable group convolutional network called VarGFaceNet. Variable group convolution is introduced by VarGNet to solve the conflict between small computational cost and the unbalance of computational intensity inside a block. We employ variable group convolution to design our network which can support large scale face identification while reduce computational cost and parameters. Specifically, we use a head setting to reserve essential information at the start of the network and propose a particular embedding setting to reduce parameters of fully-connected layer for embedding. To enhance interpretation ability, we employ an equivalence of angular distillation loss to guide our lightweight network and we apply recursive knowledge distillation to relieve the discrepancy between the teacher model and the student model. The champion of deepglint-light track of LFR (2019) challenge demonstrates the effectiveness of our model and approach. Implementation of VarGFaceNet will be released at https://github.com/zma-c-137/VarGFaceNet soon.
Large scale face recognition is challenging especially when the computational budget is limited. Given a \textit{flops} upper bound, the key is to find the optimal neural network architecture and optimization method. In this article, we briefly introduce the solutions of team 'trojans' for the ICCV19 - Lightweight Face Recognition Challenge~\cite{lfr}. The challenge requires each submission to be one single model with the computational budget no higher than 30 GFlops. We introduce a searched network architecture `Efficient PolyFace' based on the Flops constraint, a novel loss function `ArcNegFace', a novel frame aggregation method `QAN++', together with a bag of useful tricks in our implementation (augmentations, regular face, label smoothing, anchor finetuning, etc.). Our basic model, `Efficient PolyFace', takes 28.25 Gflops for the `deepglint-large' image-based track, and the `PolyFace+QAN++' solution takes 24.12 Gflops for the `iQiyi-large' video-based track. These two solutions achieve 94.198\% @ 1e-8 and 72.981\% @ 1e-4 in the two tracks respectively, which are the state-of-the-art results.