Face Recognition Using Face Patch Networks

When face images are taken in the wild, the large variations in facial pose, illumination, and expression make face recognition challenging. The most fundamental problem for face recognition is to measure the similarity between faces. The traditional measurements such as various mathematical norms, Hausdorff distance, and approximate geodesic distance cannot accurately capture the structural information between faces in such complex circumstances. To address this issue, we develop a novel face patch network, based on which we define a new similarity measure called the random path (RP) measure. The RP measure is derived from the collective similarity of paths by performing random walks in the network. It can globally characterize the contextual and curved structures of the face space. To apply the RP measure, we construct two kinds of networks: the in-face network and the out-face network. The in-face network is drawn from any two face images and captures the local structural information. The out-face network is constructed from all the training face patches, thereby modeling the global structures of face space. The two face networks are structurally complementary and can be combined together to improve the recognition performance. Experiments on the Multi-PIE and LFW benchmarks show that the RP measure outperforms most of the state-of-art algorithms for face recognition.