A2-LINK: Recognizing Disguised Faces via Active Learning and Adversarial Noise Based Inter-Domain Knowledge

Face recognition in the unconstrained environment is an ongoing research challenge. Although several covariates of face recognition such as pose and low resolution have received significant attention, 'disguise' is considered an onerous covariate of face recognition. One of the primary reasons for this is the scarcity of large and representative labeled databases, along with the lack of algorithms that work well for multiple covariates in such environments. In order to address the problem of face recognition in the presence of disguise, the paper proposes an active learning framework termed as A2-LINK. Starting with a face recognition machine-learning model, A2-LINK intelligently selects training samples from the target domain to be labeled and, using hybrid noises such as adversarial noise, fine-tunes a model that works well both in the presence and absence of disguise. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed framework on the DFW and DFW2019 datasets with state-of-the-art deep learning featurization models such as LCSSE, ArcFace, and DenseNet.