Facial landmark localization plays an important role in face recognition and analysis applications. In this paper, we give a brief introduction to a coarse-to-fine pipeline with neural networks and sequential regression. First, a global convolutional
network is applied to the holistic facial image to give an initial landmark prediction. A pyramid of multi-scale local image patches is then cropped to feed to a new network for each landmark to refine the prediction. As the refinement network outputs a more accurate position estimation than the input, such procedure could be repeated several times until the estimation converges. We evaluate our system on the 300-W dataset [11] and it outperforms the recent state-of-the-arts.
Face recognition performance improves rapidly with the recent deep learning technique developing and underlying large training dataset accumulating. In this paper, we report our observations on how big data impacts the recognition performance. Accord
ing to these observations, we build our Megvii Face Recognition System, which achieves 99.50% accuracy on the LFW benchmark, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we report the performance in a real-world security certification scenario. There still exists a clear gap between machine recognition and human performance. We summarize our experiments and present three challenges lying ahead in recent face recognition. And we indicate several possible solutions towards these challenges. We hope our work will stimulate the communitys discussion of the difference between research benchmark and real-world applications.
Face representation is a crucial step of face recognition systems. An optimal face representation should be discriminative, robust, compact, and very easy-to-implement. While numerous hand-crafted and learning-based representations have been proposed
, considerable room for improvement is still present. In this paper, we present a very easy-to-implement deep learning framework for face representation. Our method bases on a new structure of deep network (called Pyramid CNN). The proposed Pyramid CNN adopts a greedy-filter-and-down-sample operation, which enables the training procedure to be very fast and computation-efficient. In addition, the structure of Pyramid CNN can naturally incorporate feature sharing across multi-scale face representations, increasing the discriminative ability of resulting representation. Our basic network is capable of achieving high recognition accuracy ($85.8%$ on LFW benchmark) with only 8 dimension representation. When extended to feature-sharing Pyramid CNN, our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance ($97.3%$) on LFW benchmark. We also introduce a new benchmark of realistic face images on social network and validate our proposed representation has a good ability of generalization.
