Improving Multi-scale Face Recognition Using VGGFace2

Convolutional neural networks have reached extremely high performances on the Face Recognition task. These models are commonly trained by using high-resolution images and for this reason, their discrimination ability is usually degraded when they are tested against low-resolution images. Thus, Low-Resolution Face Recognition remains an open challenge for deep learning models. Such a scenario is of particular interest for surveillance systems in which it usually happens that a low-resolution probe has to be matched with higher resolution galleries. This task can be especially hard to accomplish since the probe can have resolutions as low as 8, 16 and 24 pixels per side while the typical input of state-of-the-art neural network is 224. In this paper, we described the training campaign we used to fine-tune a ResNet-50 architecture, with Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks, on the tasks of very low and mixed resolutions face recognition. For the training process we used the VGGFace2 dataset and then we tested the performance of the final model on the IJB-B dataset; in particular, we tested the neural network on the 1:1 verification task. In our experiments we considered two different scenarios: (1) probe and gallery with same resolution; (2) probe and gallery with mixed resolutions. Experimental results show that with our approach it is possible to improve upon state-of-the-art models performance on the low and mixed resolution face recognition tasks with a negligible loss at very high resolutions.