Attention-based convolutional neural network for deep face recognition

Discriminative feature embedding is of essential importance in the field of large scale face recognition. In this paper, we propose an attention-based convolutional neural network (ACNN) for discriminative face feature embedding, which aims to decrease the information redundancy among channels and focus on the most informative components of spatial feature maps. More specifically, the proposed attention module consists of a channel attention block and a spatial attention block which adaptively aggregate the feature maps in both channel and spatial domains to learn the inter-channel relationship matrix and the inter-spatial relationship matrix, then matrix multiplications are conducted for a refined and robust face feature. With the attention module we proposed, we can make standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as ResNet-50, ResNet-101 have more discriminative power for deep face recognition. The experiments on Labelled Faces in the Wild (LFW), Age Database (AgeDB), Celebrities in Frontal Profile (CFP) and MegaFace Challenge 1 (MF1) show that our proposed ACNN architecture consistently outperforms naive CNNs and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.