Consensus-Driven Propagation in Massive Unlabeled Data for Face Recognition

Xiaohang Zhan , Ziwei Liu, Junjie Yan , Dahua Lin , Chen Change Loy; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 568-583

Face recognition has witnessed great progresses in recent years, mainly attributed to the high-capacity model designed and the abundant labeled data collected. However, it becomes more and more prohibitive to scale up the current million-level identity annotations. In this work, we show that unlabeled face data can be as effective as the labeled ones. Here, we consider a setting closely mimicking the real-world scenario, where the unlabeled data are collected from unconstrained environment and their identities are exclusive from the labeled ones. Our main insight is that although the class information is not available, we can still faithfully approximate these semantic relationship by constructing a relational graph in a bottom-up manner. We propose Consensus-Driven Propagation (CDP) to tackle this challenging problem with two well-designed modules, the "committee" and the "mediator", which select positive face pairs robustly by carefully aggregating multi-view information. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of both modules to discard outliers and mine hard positives. With CDP, we achieve a compelling 78.18% on MegaFace identification challenge by using only 9% of the labels, comparing to 61.78% when no unlabeled data are used and 78.52% when all the labels are employed.