Contrastive Data Learning for Facial Pose and Illumination Normalization

Face normalization can be a crucial step when handling generic face recognition. We propose the Pose and Illumination Normalization (PIN) framework with contrast data learning for face normalization. The PIN framework is designed to learn the transformation from a source set to a target set. The source set and the target set compose a contrastive data set for learning. The source set contains faces collected in the wild and thus covers a wide range of variation across illumination, pose, expression and other variables. The target set contains face images taken under controlled conditions and all faces are in frontal pose and balanced in illumination. The PIN framework is composed of an encoder, a decoder and two discriminators. The encoder is made of a state-of-the-art face recognition network and acts as a facial feature extractor, which is not updated during training. The decoder is trained on both the source and target sets, and aims to learn the transformation from the source set to the target set; and therefore, it can transform an arbitrary face into a illumination and pose normalized face. The discriminators are trained to ensure the photo-realistic quality of the normalized face images generated by the decoder. The loss functions employed in the decoder and discriminators are appropriately designed and weighted for yielding better normalization outcomes and recognition performance. We verify the performance of the propose framework on several benchmark databases, and compare with state-of-the-art approaches.