MagFace: A Universal Representation for Face Recognition and Quality Assessment

Qiang Meng, Shichao Zhao, Zhida Huang, Feng Zhou; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 14225-14234

The performance of face recognition system degrades when the variability of the acquired faces increases. Prior work alleviates this issue by either monitoring the face quality in pre-processing or predicting the data uncertainty along with the face feature. This paper proposes MagFace, a category of losses that learn a universal feature embedding whose magnitude before normalization can measure with the quality of the given face. Under the new loss, it can be proven that the magnitude of the feature embedding monotonically increases if the subject is more likely to be recognized. In addition, MagFace introduces an adaptive mechanism to learn a well-structured within-class feature distributions by pushing easy samples to class centers while pushing hard samples away. This prevents models from overfitting on noisy low-quality samples and improves face recognition in the wild. Extensive experiments conducted on face recognition, quality assessments as well as clustering have demonstrated the effectiveness of MagFace over state-of-the-arts. The code is available at https://github.com/IrvingMeng/MagFace.