Long-Tail Face Recognition refers to the ability of a face recognition system to perform well not only on commonly encountered or well-represented faces (the “head” of the distribution) but also on faces that are less common or occur infrequently (the “long tail” of the distribution).

In the context of face recognition, the “long tail” typically refers to faces that may have limited training examples, varying lighting conditions, diverse poses, or other factors that make them less common or more challenging to recognize. Improving long-tail face recognition is important for creating more inclusive and robust face recognition systems that can accurately identify individuals across a wide range of scenarios and demographics. This is particularly relevant in real-world applications where the distribution of faces is often imbalanced.

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Feature Transfer Learning for Face Recognition with Under-Represented Data

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Despite the large volume of face recognition datasets, there is a significant portion of subjects, of which the samples are insufficient and thus under-represented. Ignoring such significant portion results in insufficient training data. Training with under-represented data leads to biased classifiers in conventionally-trained deep networks. In this paper, we propose a center-based feature transfer framework to augment the feature space of under-represented subjects from the regular subjects that have sufficiently diverse samples. A Gaussian prior of the variance is assumed across all subjects and the variance from regular ones are transferred to the under-represented ones. This encourages the under-represented distribution to be closer to the regular distribution. Further, an alternating training regimen is proposed to simultaneously achieve less biased classifiers and a more discriminative feature representation. We conduct ablative study to mimic the under-represented datasets by varying the portion of under-represented classes on the MS-Celeb-1M dataset. Advantageous results on LFW, IJB-A and MS-Celeb-1M demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature transfer and training strategy, compared to both general baselines and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our feature transfer successfully presents smooth visual interpolation, which conducts disentanglement to preserve identity of a class while augmenting its feature space with non-identity variations such as pose and lighting.

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Feature Transfer Learning for Deep Face Recognition with Long-Tail Data

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Real-world face recognition datasets exhibit long-tail characteristics, which results in biased classifiers in conventionally-trained deep neural networks, or insufficient data when long-tail classes are ignored. In this paper, we propose to handle long-tail classes in the training of a face recognition engine by augmenting their feature space under a center-based feature transfer framework. A Gaussian prior is assumed across all the head (regular) classes and the variance from regular classes are transferred to the long-tail class representation. This encourages the long-tail distribution to be closer to the regular distribution, while enriching and balancing the limited training data. Further, an alternating training regimen is proposed to simultaneously achieve less biased decision boundaries and a more discriminative feature representation. We conduct empirical studies that mimic long-tail datasets by limiting the number of samples and the proportion of long-tail classes on the MS-Celeb-1M dataset. We compare our method with baselines not designed to handle long-tail classes and also with state-of-the-art methods on face recognition benchmarks. State-of-the-art results on LFW, IJB-A and MS-Celeb-1M datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature transfer approach and training strategy. Finally, our feature transfer allows smooth visual interpolation, which demonstrates disentanglement to preserve identity of a class while augmenting its feature space with non-identity variations.

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