QGFace: Quality-Guided Joint Training For Mixed-Quality Face Recognition

The quality of a face crop in an image is decided by many factors such as camera resolution, distance, and illumination condition. This makes the discrimination of face images with different qualities a challenging problem in realistic applications. However, most existing approaches are designed specifically for high-quality (HQ) or low-quality (LQ) images, and the performances would degrade for the mixed-quality images. Besides, many methods ask for pre-trained feature extractors or other auxiliary structures to support the training and the evaluation. In this paper, we point out that the key to better understand both the HQ and the LQ images simultaneously is to apply different learning methods according to their qualities. We propose a novel quality-guided joint training approach for mixed-quality face recognition, which could simultaneously learn the images of different qualities with a single encoder. Based on quality partition, classification-based method is employed for HQ data learning. Meanwhile, for the LQ images which lack identity information, we learn them with self-supervised image-image contrastive learning. To effectively catch up the model update and improve the discriminability of contrastive learning in our joint training scenario, we further propose a proxy-updated real-time queue to compose the contrastive pairs with features from the genuine encoder. Experiments on the low-quality datasets SCface and Tinyface, the mixed-quality dataset IJB-B, and five high-quality datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in recognizing face images of different qualities.

CoReFace: Sample-Guided Contrastive Regularization for Deep Face Recognition

The discriminability of feature representation is the key to open-set face recognition. Previous methods rely on the learnable weights of the classification layer that represent the identities. However, the evaluation process learns no identity representation and drops the classifier from training. This inconsistency could confuse the feature encoder in understanding the evaluation goal and hinder the effect of identity-based methods. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a novel approach namely Contrastive Regularization for Face recognition (CoReFace) to apply image-level regularization in feature representation learning. Specifically, we employ sample-guided contrastive learning to regularize the training with the image-image relationship directly, which is consistent with the evaluation process. To integrate contrastive learning into face recognition, we augment embeddings instead of images to avoid the image quality degradation. Then, we propose a novel contrastive loss for the representation distribution by incorporating an adaptive margin and a supervised contrastive mask to generate steady loss values and avoid the collision with the classification supervision signal. Finally, we discover and solve the semantically repetitive signal problem in contrastive learning by exploring new pair coupling protocols. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our CoReFace which is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art approaches.