Towards End-to-End Face Recognition Method through Spatial Transformer

Face recognition technology is widely applied in daily life, but in most methods, similarity or affine transformation is employed to align face images according to five facial landmarks. The face alignment module is implemented independently, thus it's difficult in end-to-end training. In this paper, the main purpose is to design a towards end-to-end trainable face recognition method based on indoor scenes. Due to that spatial transformer can implement any parametrizable transformation, we joint it with recognition network, making end-to-end training possible. Simultaneously, any prior knowledge on facial landmarks isn't required. The model jointly with spatial transformer can achieve 0.3% higher accuracy than similarity transformation. Most downsampling methods ignore the sampling theorem, making convolutional networks not shift-invariant. We replace max-pooling by MaxBlurPool in spatial transformer network, and the accuracy is improved by 0.25%.