Inclusive normalization of face images to passport format

Face recognition has been used more and more in real world applications in recent years. However, when the skin color bias is coupled with intra-personal variations like harsh illumination, the face recognition task is more likely to fail, even during human inspection. Face normalization methods try to deal with such challenges by removing intra-personal variations from an input image while keeping the identity the same. However, most face normalization methods can only remove one or two variations and ignore dataset biases such as skin color bias. The outputs of many face normalization methods are also not realistic to human observers. In this work, a style based face normalization model (StyleFNM) is proposed to remove most intra-personal variations including large changes in pose, bad or harsh illumination, low resolution, blur, facial expressions, and accessories like sunglasses among others. The dataset bias is also dealt with in this paper by controlling a pretrained GAN to generate a balanced dataset of passport-like images. The experimental results show that StyleFNM can generate more realistic outputs and can improve significantly the accuracy and fairness of face recognition systems.