CATFace: Cross-Attribute-Guided Transformer with Self-Attention Distillation for Low-Quality Face Recognition

Although face recognition (FR) has achieved great success in recent years, it is still challenging to accurately recognize faces in low-quality images due to the obscured facial details. Nevertheless, it is often feasible to make predictions about specific soft biometric (SB) attributes, such as gender, and baldness even in dealing with low-quality images. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-branch neural network that leverages SB attribute information to boost the performance of FR. To this end, we propose a cross-attribute-guided transformer fusion (CATF) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies and relationships between FR and SB feature representations. The synergy created by the reciprocal flow of information in the dual cross-attention operations of the proposed CATF module enhances the performance of FR. Furthermore, we introduce a novel self-attention distillation framework that effectively highlights crucial facial regions, such as landmarks by aligning low-quality images with those of their high-quality counterparts in the feature space. The proposed self-attention distillation regularizes our network to learn a unified quality-invariant feature representation in unconstrained environments. We conduct extensive experiments on various FR benchmarks varying in quality. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our FR method compared to state-of-the-art FR studies.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (T-BIOM), 202

Robust Ensemble Morph Detection with Domain Generalization

Although a substantial amount of studies is dedicated to morph detection, most of them fail to generalize for morph faces outside of their training paradigm. Moreover, recent morph detection methods are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we intend to learn a morph detection model with high generalization to a wide range of morphing attacks and high robustness against different adversarial attacks. To this aim, we develop an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer models to benefit from their capabilities simultaneously. To improve the robust accuracy of the ensemble model, we employ multi-perturbation adversarial training and generate adversarial examples with high transferability for several single models. Our exhaustive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed robust ensemble model generalizes to several morphing attacks and face datasets. In addition, we validate that our robust ensemble model gain better robustness against several adversarial attacks while outperforming the state-of-the-art studies.Comment: Accepted in IJCB 202

CCFace: Classification Consistency for Low-Resolution Face Recognition

In recent years, deep face recognition methods have demonstrated impressive results on in-the-wild datasets. However, these methods have shown a significant decline in performance when applied to real-world low-resolution benchmarks like TinyFace or SCFace. To address this challenge, we propose a novel classification consistency knowledge distillation approach that transfers the learned classifier from a high-resolution model to a low-resolution network. This approach helps in finding discriminative representations for low-resolution instances. To further improve the performance, we designed a knowledge distillation loss using the adaptive angular penalty inspired by the success of the popular angular margin loss function. The adaptive penalty reduces overfitting on low-resolution samples and alleviates the convergence issue of the model integrated with data augmentation. Additionally, we utilize an asymmetric cross-resolution learning approach based on the state-of-the-art semi-supervised representation learning paradigm to improve discriminability on low-resolution instances and prevent them from forming a cluster. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on low-resolution benchmarks, with a three percent improvement on TinyFace while maintaining performance on high-resolution benchmarks.Comment: 2023 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB

Towards Generalizable Morph Attack Detection with Consistency Regularization

Though recent studies have made significant progress in morph attack detection by virtue of deep neural networks, they often fail to generalize well to unseen morph attacks. With numerous morph attacks emerging frequently, generalizable morph attack detection has gained significant attention. This paper focuses on enhancing the generalization capability of morph attack detection from the perspective of consistency regularization. Consistency regularization operates under the premise that generalizable morph attack detection should output consistent predictions irrespective of the possible variations that may occur in the input space. In this work, to reach this objective, two simple yet effective morph-wise augmentations are proposed to explore a wide space of realistic morph transformations in our consistency regularization. Then, the model is regularized to learn consistently at the logit as well as embedding levels across a wide range of morph-wise augmented images. The proposed consistency regularization aligns the abstraction in the hidden layers of our model across the morph attack images which are generated from diverse domains in the wild. Experimental results demonstrate the superior generalization and robustness performance of our proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art studies.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB), 202

Multi-Context Dual Hyper-Prior Neural Image Compression

Transform and entropy models are the two core components in deep image compression neural networks. Most existing learning-based image compression methods utilize convolutional-based transform, which lacks the ability to model long-range dependencies, primarily due to the limited receptive field of the convolution operation. To address this limitation, we propose a Transformer-based nonlinear transform. This transform has the remarkable ability to efficiently capture both local and global information from the input image, leading to a more decorrelated latent representation. In addition, we introduce a novel entropy model that incorporates two different hyperpriors to model cross-channel and spatial dependencies of the latent representation. To further improve the entropy model, we add a global context that leverages distant relationships to predict the current latent more accurately. This global context employs a causal attention mechanism to extract long-range information in a content-dependent manner. Our experiments show that our proposed framework performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of rate-distortion performance.Comment: Accepted to IEEE 22$^nd$ International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications 2023 (ICMLA) - Selected for Oral Presentatio

AAFACE: Attribute-aware Attentional Network for Face Recognition

In this paper, we present a new multi-branch neural network that simultaneously performs soft biometric (SB) prediction as an auxiliary modality and face recognition (FR) as the main task. Our proposed network named AAFace utilizes SB attributes to enhance the discriminative ability of FR representation. To achieve this goal, we propose an attribute-aware attentional integration (AAI) module to perform weighted integration of FR with SB feature maps. Our proposed AAI module is not only fully context-aware but also capable of learning complex relationships between input features by means of the sequential multi-scale channel and spatial sub-modules. Experimental results verify the superiority of our proposed network compared with the state-of-the-art (SoTA) SB prediction and FR methods.Comment: Accepted to $30^{th}$ IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2023) as an oral presentatio