Face Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks and Subspace Learning

Deep learning is widely used in computer vision. In this study, we present a new method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and subspace learning for face recognition under two circumstances. A very deep CNN architecture called VGG-Face, which learned on a large scale database, is used as feature extractor to extract the activation vector of the fully connected layer in the CNN architecture. Then, two types of subspace learning methods, namely, linear discriminate analysis (LDA) and whitening principal component analysis (WPCA), are respectively introduced to learn the subspace of the activation vectors for face recognition under multiple samples per subject and single sample per subject circumstances. The goals of applying subspace learning to the activation vectors are obtaining compact representation (dimensionality reduction) and performance improvement. Experiments on two face databases (CMU PIE and FERET) demonstrate the effectiveness of VGG-Face + LDA and VGG-Face + WPCA, compared with state-of-the-art methods.