Face recognition has made extraordinary progress owing to the advancement of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The central task of face recognition, including face verification and identification, involves face feature discrimination. However, the traditional softmax loss of deep CNNs usually lacks the power of discrimination. To address this problem, recently several loss functions such as center loss, large margin softmax loss, and angular softmax loss have been proposed. All these improved losses share the same idea: maximizing inter-class variance and minimizing intra-class variance. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function, namely large margin cosine loss (LMCL), to realize this idea from a different perspective. More specifically, we reformulate the softmax loss as a cosine loss by L 2 normalizing both features and weight vectors to remove radial variations, based on which a cosine margin term is introduced to further maximize the decision margin in the angular space. As a result, minimum intra-class variance and maximum inter-class variance are achieved by virtue of normalization and cosine decision margin maximization. We refer to our model trained with LMCL as CosFace.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been pushing the frontier of the face recognition research in the past years. However, existing general CNN face models generalize poorly to the scenario of occlusions on variable facial areas. Inspired by the fact that a human visual system explicitly ignores occlusions and only focuses on nonoccluded facial areas, we propose a mask learning strategy to find and discard the corrupted feature elements for face recognition. A mask dictionary is firstly established by exploiting the differences between the top convoluted features of occluded and occlusion-free face pairs using an innovatively designed Pairwise Differential Siamese Network (PDSN). Each item of this dictionary captures the correspondence between occluded facial areas and corrupted feature elements, which is named Feature Discarding Mask (FDM). When dealing with a face image with random partial occlusions, we generate its FDM by combining relevant dictionary items and then multiply it with the original features to eliminate those corrupted feature elements. Comprehensive experiments on both synthesized and realistic occluded face datasets show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

Age invariant face recognition has received increasing attention due to its great potential in real world applications. In spite of the great progress in face recognition techniques, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a difficult task. The facial appearance of a person changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. Hence, the key to tackle this problem is to separate the variation caused by aging from the person-specific features that are stable. Specifically, we propose a new method, called Hidden Factor Analysis (HFA). This method captures the intuition above through a probabilistic model with two latent factors: an identity factor that is age-invariant and an age factor affected by the aging process. Then, the observed appearance can be modeled as a combination of the components generated based on these factors. We also develop a learning algorithm that jointly estimates the latent factors and the model parameters using an EM procedure. Extensive experiments on two well-known public domain face aging datasets: MORPH (the largest public face aging database) and FGNET, clearly show that the proposed method achieves notable improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms.

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As facial appearance is subject to significant intra-class variations caused by the aging process over time, age-invariant face recognition (AIFR) remains a major challenge in face recognition community. To reduce the intra-class discrepancy caused by the aging, in this paper we propose a novel approach (namely, Orthogonal Embedding CNNs, or OE-CNNs) to learn the age-invariant deep face features. Specifically, we decompose deep face features into two orthogonal components to represent age-related and identity-related features. As a result, identity-related features that are robust to aging are then used for AIFR. Besides, for complementing the existing cross-age datasets and advancing the research in this field, we construct a brand-new large-scale Cross-Age Face dataset (CAF). Extensive experiments conducted on the three public domain face aging datasets (MORPH Album 2, CACD-VS and FG-NET) have shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the value of the constructed CAF dataset on AIFR. Benchmarking our algorithm on one of the most popular general face recognition (GFR) dataset LFW additionally demonstrates the comparable generalization performance on GFR.Recent AIFR researches primarily concentrate on two technical schemes: generative scheme and discriminative scheme. The generative scheme models the AIFR by synthesizing faces to one or more fixed age category then performs recognition with the artificial face representations [9,16,30].

There has been an increasing research interest in ageinvariant face recognition. However, matching faces with big age gaps remains a challenging problem, primarily due to the significant discrepancy of face appearances caused by aging. To reduce such a discrepancy, in this paper we propose a novel algorithm to remove age-related components from features mixed with both identity and age information. Specifically, we factorize a mixed face feature into two uncorrelated components: identity-dependent component and age-dependent component, where the identitydependent component includes information that is useful for face recognition. To implement this idea, we propose the Decorrelated Adversarial Learning (DAL) algorithm, where a Canonical Mapping Module (CMM) is introduced to find the maximum correlation between the paired features generated by a backbone network, while the backbone network and the factorization module are trained to generate features reducing the correlation. Thus, the proposed model learns the decomposed features of age and identity whose correlation is significantly reduced. Simultaneously, the identity-dependent feature and the age-dependent feature are respectively supervised by ID and age preserving signals to ensure that they both contain the correct information. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular public-domain face aging datasets (FG-NET, MORPH Album 2, and CACD-VS) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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