Split-Net: Improving face recognition in one forwarding operation

Abstract The performance of face recognition has been improved a lot owing to deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) recently. Because of the semantic structure of face images, local part as well as global shape is informative for learning robust deep face feature representation. In order to simultaneously exploit global and local information, existing deep learning methods for face recognition tend to train multiple CNN models and combine different features based on various local image patches, which requires multiple forwarding operations for each testing image and introduces much more computation as well as running time. In this paper, we aim at improving face recognition in only one forwarding operation by simultaneously exploiting global and local information in one model. To address this problem, we propose a unified end-to-end framework, named as Split-Net, which splits selective intermediate feature maps into several branches instead of cropping on original images. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can effectively improve the accuracy of face recognition with less computation increased. Specifically, we increase the accuracy by one percent on LFW under standard protocol and reduce the error by 50% under BLUFR protocol. The performance of Split-Net matches state-of-the-arts with smaller training set and less computation finally.