Effective face recognition based on anomaly image detection and sequential analysis of neural descriptors

In this paper, we explore the possibility to improve efficiency of face recognition using information about anomaly input images. Indeed, modern publicly-available datasets typically contain images of mostly middle-aged and Caucasian people, which cause most algorithms to fail on photos of older people or children, rarer ethnicities, poor-quality images, etc. Detection of such anomaly data and its subsequent rejection helps to improve the classification accuracy. We propose a novel algorithm, at the first stage of which a convolutional neural network is used to detect anomalies in input images. This network is trained on a specially created set of rare data. The second stage is the sequential analysis of neural descriptors extracted from input faces to improve the computational efficiency of classification. An experimental study on the VGGFace2 and MS-Celeb-1M datasets using neural network descriptors, including contemporary InsightFace models, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.