We propose a novel approach to template based face recognition. Our dual goal
is to both increase recognition accuracy and reduce the computational and
storage costs of template matching. To do this, we leverage on an approach
which was proven effective in many other domains, but, to our knowledge, never
fully explored for face images: average pooling of face photos. We show how
(and why!) the space of a template's images can be partitioned and then pooled
based on image quality and head pose and the effect this has on accuracy and
template size. We perform extensive tests on the IJB-A and Janus CS2 template
based face identification and verification benchmarks. These show that not only
does our approach outperform published state of the art despite requiring far
fewer cross template comparisons, but also, surprisingly, that image pooling
performs on par with deep feature pooling.Comment: Appeared in the IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Biometrics, IEEE
Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June, 201