FRA: A novel Face Representation Augmentation algorithm for face recognition

A low amount of training data for many state-of-the-art deep learning-based Face Recognition (FR) systems causes a marked deterioration in their performance. Although a considerable amount of research has addressed this issue by inventing new data augmentation techniques, using either input space transformations or Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for feature space augmentations, these techniques have yet to satisfy expectations. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named the Face Representation Augmentation (FRA) algorithm, for augmenting face datasets. To the best of our knowledge, FRA is the first method that shifts its focus towards manipulating the face embeddings generated by any face representation learning algorithm in order to generate new embeddings representing the same identity and facial emotion but with an altered posture. Extensive experiments conducted in this study convince the efficacy of our methodology and its power to provide noiseless, completely new facial representations to improve the training procedure of any FR algorithm. Therefore, FRA is able to help the recent state-of-the-art FR methods by providing more data for training FR systems. The proposed method, using experiments conducted on the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) dataset, improves the identity classification accuracies by 9.52 %, 10.04 %, and 16.60 %, in comparison with the base models of MagFace, ArcFace, and CosFace, respectively.