Multi-Task Convolutional Neural Network for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition

This paper explores multi-task learning (MTL) for face recognition. First, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) for face recognition, where identity classification is the main task and pose, illumination, and expression (PIE) estimations are the side tasks. Second, we develop a dynamic-weighting scheme to automatically assign the loss weights to each side task, which solves the crucial problem of balancing between different tasks in MTL. Third, we propose a pose-directed multi-task CNN by grouping different poses to learn pose-specific identity features, simultaneously across all poses in a joint framework. Last but not least, we propose an energy-based weight analysis method to explore how CNN-based MTL works. We observe that the side tasks serve as regularizations to disentangle the PIE variations from the learnt identity features. Extensive experiments on the entire multi-PIE dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work using all data in multi-PIE for face recognition. Our approach is also applicable to in-the-wild data sets for pose-invariant face recognition and achieves comparable or better performance than state of the art on LFW, CFP, and IJB-A datasets.