Pose-and-illumination-invariant face representation via a triplet-loss trained deep reconstruction model

Face recognition under variable pose and illumination is a challenging problem in computer vision tasks. In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a new residual based deep face reconstruction neural network to extract discriminative pose-and-illumination-invariant (PII) features. Our deep model can change arbitrary pose and illumination face images to the frontal view with standard illumination. We propose a new triplet-loss training method instead of Euclidean loss to optimize our model, which has two advantages: a) The training triplets can be easily augmented by freely choosing combinations of labeled face images, in this way, overfitting can be avoided; b) The triplet-loss training makes the PII features more discriminative even when training samples have similar appearance. By using our PII features, we achieve 83.8% average recognition accuracy on MultiPIE face dataset which is competitive to the state-of-the-art face recognition methods.