Efficient face recognition system for operating in unconstrained environments

Facial recognition is fundamental for a wide variety of security systems operating in real-time applications. Recently, several deep neural networks algorithms have been developed to achieve state-of-the-art performance on this task. The present work was conceived due to the need for an efficient and low-cost processing system, so a real-time facial recognition system was proposed using a combination of deep learning algorithms like FaceNet and some traditional classifiers like SVM, KNN, and RF using moderate hardware to operate in an unconstrained environment. Generally, a facial recognition system involves two main tasks: face detection and recognition. The proposed scheme uses the YOLO-Face method for the face detection task which is a high-speed real-time detector based on YOLOv3, while, for the recognition stage, a combination of FaceNet with a supervised learning algorithm, such as the support vector machine (SVM), is proposed for classification. Extensive experiments on unconstrained datasets demonstrate that YOLO-Face provides better performance when the face under an analysis presents partial occlusion and pose variations; besides that, it can detect small faces. The face detector was able to achieve an accuracy of over 89.6% using the Honda/UCSD dataset which runs at 26 FPS with darknet-53 to VGA-resolution images for classification tasks. The experimental results have demonstrated that the FaceNet+SVM model was able to achieve an accuracy of 99.7% using the LFW dataset. On the same dataset, FaceNet+KNN and FaceNet+RF achieve 99.5% and 85.1%, respectively; on the other hand, the FaceNet was able to achieve 99.6%. Finally, the proposed system provides a recognition accuracy of 99.1% and 49 ms runtime when both the face detection and classifications stages operate together.