One-Shot Face Recognition via Generative Learning

One-shot face recognition measures the ability to recognize persons with only seeing them once, which is a hallmark of human visual intelligence. It is challenging for existing machine learning approaches to mimic this way, since limited data cannot well represent the data variance. To this end, we propose to build a large-scale face recognizer, which is capable to fight off the data imbalance difficulty. To seek a more effective general classifier, we develop a novel generative model attempting to synthesize meaningful data for one-shot classes by adapting the data variances from other normal classes. Specifically, we formulate conditional generative adversarial networks and the general Softmax classifier into a unified framework. Such a two-player minimax optimization can guide the generation of more effective data, which benefit the classifier learning for one-shot classes. The experimental results on a large-scale face benchmark with 21K persons verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in one-shot classification, as our generative model significantly improves the recognition coverage rate from 25.65% to 94.84% at the precision of 99% for the one-shot classes, while still keeps an overall Top-1 accuracy at 99.80% for the normal classes.