SELM: Siamese extreme learning machine with application to face biometrics

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is a powerful classification method and is very competitive among existing classification methods. It is speedy at training. Nevertheless, it cannot perform face verification tasks properly because face verification tasks require the comparison of facial images of two individuals simultaneously and decide whether the two faces identify the same person. The ELM structure was not designed to feed two input data streams simultaneously. Thus, in 2-input scenarios, ELM methods are typically applied using concatenated inputs. However, this setup consumes two times more computational resources, and it is not optimized for recognition tasks where learning a separable distance metric is critical. For these reasons, we propose and develop a Siamese extreme learning machine (SELM). SELM was designed to be fed with two data streams in parallel simultaneously. It utilizes a dual-stream Siamese condition in the extra Siamese layer to transform the data before passing it to the hidden layer. Moreover, we propose a Gender-Ethnicity-dependent triplet feature exclusively trained on various specific demographic groups. This feature enables learning and extracting useful facial features of each group. Experiments were conducted to evaluate and compare the performances of SELM, ELM, and deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). The experimental results showed that the proposed feature could perform correct classification at $$ accuracy and $$ area under the curve (AUC). They also showed that using SELM in conjunction with the proposed feature provided $$ accuracy and $$ AUC. SELM outperformed the robust performances over the well-known DCNN and ELM methods.