An Implicit Identity-Extended Data Augmentation for Low-Resolution Face Representation Learning

Low-resolution (LR) face recognition (LRFR) tackles
tiny face images
detected from real-world surveillance camera footage, which are unconstrained and generally poor in quality. Owing to the absence of a million-scale labeled LR face dataset,
identity-invariant
data augmentation (DA) transformations such as flipping, rotation, rescaling, etc., are applied to inflate the effective training examples with respect to the source identities for representation learning. Unfortunately, the identity-invariant property incurs additional intra-class disparity that impairs generalization performance. In this paper, we put forward a new means of DA strategy, termed
identity-extended
DA, that satisfies both
affinity
and
diversity
requirements essential to DA. We instantiate an implicit identity-extended augmentation network, or simply IDEA-Net, to realize the proposed identity-extended DA for LRFR. More specifically, training an IDEA-Net instance augments the small-scale LR (query) face dataset with identity-extended (auxiliary) face examples implicitly in the representation space. We also introduce a calibrator to regulate the disordered representation space by refining the intra-class compactness and the inter-class separation. This diminishes the distribution shift between the original and the augmented examples (affinity) and increases the learning complexity (diversity). We substantiate that IDEA-Net renders a high affinity and diversity representation space. On the other hand, our experimental results on three real-world LR face datasets demonstrate that IDEA-Nets outperform the baselines and other counterparts trained without leveraging the identity-extended examples for LRFR.