An Efficient and Accurate Face Verification Method Based on CNN Cascade Architecture

Unconstrained face verification has been actively studied for decades in computer vision. Recent algorithms rely on Convolution Neural Network to further improve the accuracy. However, such algorithms tend to be time-consuming and computationally complex, which cannot meet the real-time requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate face verification method based on Convolution Neural Network Cascade architecture. First, we use a compact network to handle most of the simple samples. Then, we use a complex network to handle a small number of hard samples. Finally, we use an ensemble of multi-patch networks with metric learning. Our method achieves an accuracy of 99.72% on LFW, which performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we significantly reduce time cost from 485ms to only 20ms on a single core i7-4790, which has strong practical value for real-time face verification systems. Keywords-face verification; deep learning; convolution neural network; metric learning