On Black-Box Explanation for Face Verification

Domingo Mery, Bernardita Morris; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022, pp. 3418-3427

Given a facial matcher, in explainable face verification, the task is to answer: how relevant are the parts of a probe image to establish the matching with an enrolled image. In many cases, however, the trained models cannot be manipulated and must be treated as "black-boxes". In this paper, we present six different saliency maps that can be used to explain any face verification algorithm with no manipulation inside of the face recognition model. The key idea of the methods is based on how the matching score of the two face images changes when the probe is perturbed. The proposed methods remove and aggregate different parts of the face, and measure contributions of these parts individually and in-collaboration as well. We test and compare our proposed methods in three different scenarios: synthetic images with different qualities and occlusions, real face images with different facial expressions, poses, and occlusions and faces from different demographic groups. In our experiments, five different face verification algorithms are used: ArcFace, Dlib, FaceNet (trained on VGGface2 and Casia-WebFace), and LBP. We conclude that one of the proposed methods achieves saliency maps that are stable and interpretable to humans. In addition, our method, in combination with a new visualization of saliency maps based on contours, shows promising results in comparison with other state-of-the-art art methods. This paper presents good insights into any face verification algorithm, in which it can be clearly appreciated which are the most relevant face areas that an algorithm takes into account to carry out the recognition process.