Occlusion Robust Face Recognition Based on Mask Learning With Pairwise Differential Siamese Network

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been pushing the frontier of face recognition over past years. However, existing CNN models are far less accurate when handling partially occluded faces. These general face models generalize poorly for occlusions on variable facial areas. Inspired by the fact that human visual system explicitly ignores the occlusion and only focuses on the non-occluded facial areas, we propose a mask learning strategy to find and discard corrupted feature elements from recognition. A mask dictionary is firstly established by exploiting the differences between the top conv features of occluded and occlusion-free face pairs using 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 from recognition. Comprehensive experiments on both synthesized and realistic occluded face datasets show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art systems.