Leibniz Transactions on Embedded Systems (Nov 2022)
Susceptibility to Image Resolution in Face Recognition and Training Strategies to Enhance Robustness
Abstract
Many face recognition approaches expect the input images to have similar image resolution. However, in real-world applications, the image resolution varies due to different image capture mechanisms or sources, affecting the performance of face recognition systems. This work first analyzes the image resolution susceptibility of modern face recognition. Face verification on the very popular LFW dataset drops from 99.23% accuracy to almost 55% when image dimensions of both images are reduced to arguable very poor resolution. With cross-resolution image pairs (one HR and one LR image), face verification accuracy is even worse. This characteristic is investigated more in-depth by analyzing the feature distances utilized for face verification. To increase the robustness, we propose two training strategies applied to a state-of-the-art face recognition model: 1) Training with 50% low resolution images within each batch and 2) using the cosine distance loss between high and low resolution features in a siamese network structure. Both methods significantly boost face verification accuracy for matching training and testing image resolutions. Training a network with different resolutions simultaneously instead of adding only one specific low resolution showed improvements across all resolutions and made a single model applicable to unknown resolutions. However, models trained for one particular low resolution perform better when using the exact resolution for testing. We improve the face verification accuracy from 96.86% to 97.72% on the popular LFW database with uniformly distributed image dimensions between 112 × 112 px and 5 × 5 px. Our approaches improve face verification accuracy even more from 77.56% to 87.17% for distributions focusing on lower images resolutions. Lastly, we propose specific image dimension sets focusing on high, mid, and low resolution for five well-known datasets to benchmark face verification accuracy in cross-resolution scenarios.
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