DAM: Discrepancy Alignment Metric for Face Recognition

Jiaheng Liu, Yudong Wu, Yichao Wu, Chuming Li, Xiaolin Hu, Ding Liang, Mengyu Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 3814-3823

The field of face recognition (FR) has witnessed remarkable progress with the surge of deep learning. The effective loss functions play an important role for FR. In this paper, we observe that a majority of loss functions, including the widespread triplet loss and softmax-based cross-entropy loss, embed inter-class (negative) similarity s_n and intra-class (positive) similarity s_p into similarity pairs and optimize to reduce (s_n - s_p) in the training process. However, in the verification process, existing metrics directly take the absolute similarity between two features as the confidence of belonging to the same identity, which inevitably causes a gap between the training and verification process. To bridge the gap, we propose a new metric called Discrepancy Alignment Metric (DAM) for verification, which introduces the Local Inter-class Discrepancy (LID) for each face image to normalize the absolute similarity score. To estimate the LID of each face image in the verification process, we propose two types of LID Estimation (LIDE) methods, which are reference-based and learning-based estimation methods, respectively. The proposed DAM is plug-and-play and can be easily applied to the most existing methods. Extensive experiments on multiple popular face recognition benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.