Unsupervised Face Domain Transfer for Low-Resolution Face Recognition

Low-resolution face recognition suffers from domain shift due to the different resolution between a high-resolution gallery and a low-resolution probe set. Conventional methods use the pairwise correlation between high-resolution and low-resolution for the same subject, which requires label information for both gallery and probe sets. However, explicitly labeled low-resolution probe images are seldom available, and labeling them is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised face domain transfer for robust low-resolution face recognition. By leveraging the attention mechanism, the proposed generative face augmentation reduces the domain shift at image-level, while spatial resolution adaptation generates domain-invariant and discriminant feature distributions. On public datasets, we demonstrate the complementarity between generative face augmentation at image-level and spatial resolution adaptation at feature-level. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised methods even though we do not use any label information of low-resolution probe set.