Free High Quality Face Recognition
High Quality Face Recognition with Deep Metric Learning


Since the last dlib release, I've been working on adding easy to use deep metric learning tooling to dlib. Deep metric learning is useful for a lot of things, but the most popular application is face recognition. So obviously I had to add a face recognition example program to dlib. The new example comes with pictures of bald Hollywood action heroes and uses the provided deep metric model to identify how many different people there are and which faces belong to each person. The input images are shown below along with the four automatically identified face clusters:





Just like all the other example dlib models, the pretrained model used by this example program is in the public domain. So you can use it for anything you want. Also, the model has an accuracy of 99.38% on the standard Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark. This is comparable to other state-of-the-art models and means that, given two face images, it correctly predicts if the images are of the same person 99.38% of the time.

For those interested in the model details, this model is a ResNet network with 29 conv layers. It's essentially a version of the ResNet-34 network from the paper Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition by He, Zhang, Ren, and Sun with a few layers removed and the number of filters per layer reduced by half.

The network was trained from scratch on a dataset of about 3 million faces. This dataset is derived from a number of datasets. The face scrub dataset[2], the VGG dataset[1], and then a large number of images I personally scraped from the internet. I tried as best I could to clean up the combined dataset by removing labeling errors, which meant filtering out a lot of stuff from VGG. I did this by repeatedly training a face recognition model and then using graph clustering methods and a lot of manual review to clean up the dataset. In the end, about half the images are from VGG and face scrub. Also, the total number of individual identities in the dataset is 7485. I made sure to avoid overlap with identities in LFW so the LFW evaluation would be valid.

The network training started with randomly initialized weights and used a structured metric loss that tries to project all the identities into non-overlapping balls of radius 0.6. The loss is basically a type of pair-wise hinge loss that runs over all pairs in a mini-batch and includes hard-negative mining at the mini-batch level. The training code is obviously also available, since that sort of thing is basically the point of dlib. You can find all details on training and model specifics by reading the example program and consulting the referenced parts of dlib.  There is also a Python API for accessing the face recognition model.



[1] O. M. Parkhi, A. Vedaldi, A. Zisserman Deep Face Recognition British Machine Vision Conference, 2015.
[2] H.-W. Ng, S. Winkler. A data-driven approach to cleaning large face datasets. Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Paris, France, Oct. 27-30, 2014

