An automated and efficient convolutional architecture for disguise-invariant face recognition using noise-based data augmentation and deep transfer learning

Face recognition is diversely used in modern biometric and security applications. Most of the current face recognition techniques show good results in a constrained environment. However, these techniques face many problems in real-world scenarios such as low-quality images, temporal variations and facial disguises creating variations in facial features. The reason for these deteriorating results is the employment of handcrafted features having weak generalization capabilities and neglecting the complexities associated with domain adaption in case of deep learning models. In this paper, we have studied the efficacy of deep learning methods incorporating simple noise-based data augmentation for disguise invariant face recognition (DIFR). The proposed method detects face in an image using Viola Jones face detector and classifies it using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) fine-tuned for DIFR. During transfer learning, a pre-trained CNN learns generalized disguise-invariant features from facial images of several subjects to correctly identify them under varying facial disguises. We have compared four different pre-trained 2D CNNs, each with different number of learning parameters, based on their classification accuracy and execution time for selecting a suitable model for DIFR. Comprehensive experiments and comparative analysis have been conducted on six challenging facial disguise datasets. Resnet-18 gives the best trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, by achieving an average accuracy of 98.19% with an average execution time of 0.32 seconds. The promising results achieved in these experiments reflect the efficiency of the proposed method and outperforms the existing methods in all aspects.