Deep Face Recognition for Biometric Authentication

Face is one of the most widely used biometrics for human identity authentication. Facial recognition has remained an interesting and active research area in the past several decades due to its ever growing applications in biometric authentication, content based data retrieval, video surveillance, access control and social media. Unlike other biometric systems, facial recognition based systems work independently without involving the individual, due to which it does not add unnecessary delay. Its ability of recognizing multiple persons at a time further adds to its speed. There are many face recognition methods based on traditional machine learning that are available in the literature. Improvements are being made with the constant developments in computer vision and machine learning. However, most of the traditional methods lack robustness against varying illumination, facial expression, scale, occlusions and pose. With the advent of big data and graphical computing, deep learning has impressively advanced the traditional computer vision systems over the past decade. In this paper, we present a convolutional neural network based face recognition system which detects faces in an input image using Viola Jones face detector and automatically extracts facial features from detected faces using a pre-trained CNN for recognition. A large database of facial images of subjects is created, which is augmented in order to increase the number of images per subject and to incorporate different illumination and noise conditions for optimal training of the convolutional neural network. Moreover, an optimal pretrained CNN model along with a set of hyperparameters is experimentally selected for deep face recognition. Promising experimental results, with an overall accuracy of 98.76%, are obtained which depict the effectiveness of deep face recognition in automated biometric authentication systems.