Lightweight Low-Resolution Face Recognition for Surveillance Applications

Typically, real-world requirements to deploy face recognition models in unconstrained surveillance scenarios demand to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. In the last years, several methods based on complex deep learning models have been proposed with promising recognition results but at a high computational cost. Inspired by the compactness and computation efficiency of lightweight deep face networks and their high accuracy on general face recognition tasks, in this work we propose to benchmark two recently introduced lightweight face models on low-resolution surveillance imagery to enable efficient system deployment. In this way, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the two typical settings: LR-to-HR and LR-to-LR matching. In addition, we investigate the effect of using trained models with down-sampled synthetic data from high-resolution images, as well as the combination of different models, for face recognition on real low-resolution images. Experimental results show that the used lightweight face models achieve state-of-the-art results on low-resolution benchmarks with low memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, we observed that combining models trained with different degradations improves the recognition accuracy on low-resolution surveillance imagery, which is feasible due to their low computational cost.