2023 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Power, Electronics and Computer Applications (ICPECA)
An Efficient Face Recognition Method Based on
CNN
2023 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Power, Electronics and Computer Applications (ICPECA) | 978-1-6654-7278-4/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICPECA56706.2023.10076242
Xiu He*, Feng Ding
Guangzhou Xinhua University, Guangzhou, China
*Corresponding author: hexiushow@163.com
Abstract—As a prevailing research in artificial intelligence,
the application of computer vision is widely used in many fields
which are closely related to people's livelihood, such as
industrial automation, new retail industry, smart
transportation and security monitoring. And the proposed face
recognition method is a branch in the field of computer vision,
it integrates neural networks, biology, image signal processing,
machine learning and other fields, which promote research and
cross-development among different disciplines. Hence, this
paper focuses on face recognition method by using
convolutional neural network(CNN), and CNN has the
property of "weight sharing", which has been widely
popularized in image recognition, it can greatly simplify the
work of large-scale network training. The experiments
demonstrate that the proposed face recognition method is
successful, and the accuracy of the proposed method can be as
high as 98%.
Keywords—Face recognition, convolutional neural network,
artificial intelligence, computer vision
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, our life has changed a lot with the
rapid development of computer and network technology.
The traditional identification methods such as IC cards and
ID cards cannot avoid damage, loss, forgery, etc., which
have certain limitations and drawbacks, and they have
slowly faded from contemporary society. As one of the
biometric identification methods, face recognition is to
obtain faces from static images or video streams, and
extracts facial feature information to achieve the purposes of
identity verification and identification. This technology has
some good characteristics of non-intrusiveness,
non-perceptual recognition and convenient data collection,
and which has been widely used in many important fields
such as industrial automation, new retail industry, smart
transportation, security monitoring, and so on.
On the other hand, the breakthrough achievements in
artificial intelligence promote the development of face
recognition technology. After the great success of CNN on
the ImageNet image challenge, some classical CNN
architectures are proposed , which can be used to extract
deep features. Among them, AlexNet[1], VGGNet [2],
GoogleNet [3] and Residual Network [4] are the most
widely used, and which have become backbone networks
for feature extraction in various fields. In addition, CNN has
a natural advantage in processing nonlinear data. When face
images are input to the cascaded convolutional layers,
pooling layers and fully connected layers for feature
extraction, CNN can not only achieve the purpose of data
dimensionality reduction, but also retain effective feature
information. Therefore, the face recognition method based
on CNN is valuable.
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II. RELATED WORK
Generally, we can divide face recognition methods into
two categories, there are respectively traditional methods
and deep neural networks methods. Traditional methods
mainly include some global algorithms, such as EigenFace
algorithm and FisherFace algorithm, and also inculde some
local descriptors algorithms, such as LBP histogram
algorithm and Scale Invariant Feature Transform algorithm.
In 1991, Matthew Turk proposed a famous EigenFace[5]
method, which first introduced Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) and statistical feature techniques into face
recognition tasks, and achieved well in practical
applications. As a continuation of this idea, Belhumer[6]
introduced FisherFace method based on Linear
Discrimination Analysis (LDA) and employed Fisher's
discriminant criterion to face recognition once again. Then,
sparse representation is proposed for face recognition[7].
Later, the Gabor operator has also been widely recognized
in practice and been successfully applied to face recognition
algorithms[8].
With the development of deep learning technology, it
was also successfully applied in face recognition. Several
teams at home and abroad have successively proposed
several CNN-based face recognition methods. The
DeepFace[9] model is the first algorithm to use CNN.
DeepFace used 6 convolutional layers and 2 fully connected
layers, wherein the first 3 convolutional layers are
convolutional operations with shared weights, which are
used to extract features from the entire image. The last three
convolutional layers use local connections to extract
different features on different parts of face images.
DeepFace has achieved well on the LFW dataset in face
recognition, which can approach the recognition level of
humans approximately. Then Professor Tang’s team
proposed a novel DeepID[10] method, which is to use deep
learning to extract deep-level face features. DeepID adopted
a similar network structure and the same loss function as
DeepFace, but it introduced some novel ideas of data
enhancement and ensemble learning, and experiments
indicated that this method improved the accuracy of
recognition. Based on DeepID, the team further proposed
DeepIDv2 model. The improvement of DeepIDv2 focused
on the calculation of loss function, it not only retained the
original classification loss, but also introduced intra-class
loss and inter-class loss. Ultimately, DeepV2 model
achieved an accurate recognition rate of 99.15%, and deep
neural networks outperform human recognition on this data
set for the first time.
After 2016, the focus of face recognition research had
gradually shifted to the design of loss functions, and the
discussion space of research problems had also gradually
1788 January 29-31, 2023 Shenyang, China
transitioned from the euclidean space to the angle space.
The main representative works during this period included
some algorithms such as CenterLoss, SphereFace, CosFace,
Sface and ArcFace[11-15]. Among them, the ArcFace
algorithm was the most convincing work, they improved the
SphereFace algorithm by adding normalization operations to
eigenvectors and additive angle intervals, so the ArcFace
algorithm not only improved the separability of different
classes, but also strengthened the compactness in intra-class
and the dissimilarity in inter-class. After some years of
research, the development of face recognition technology
Fig.1 Workflow diagram of face recognition method
(1) Data preprocessing
Face recognition method proposed in the work uses a
deep learning algorithm CNN to recognize the contour
features of faces, and has low requirements for color.
Therefore, for color images, we convert them into grayscale
images, and there are
V (i, j ) = 0.299 Ri, j + 0.587Gi , j + 0.114 Bi , j .
wherein Ri,j, Gi,j, and Bi,j are the pixel value of three
color channels at positions i and j, respectively.
(2) Face detection
In this stage, we employ the deep learning MTCNN
method to face detection. In this algorithm, the images need
Fig.2 Working model of CNN
As shown in Fig. 2. First, input face image 32*32 is
convolved with six trainable convolution kernels and bias
terms, and six feature maps are generated in the H1
convolution layer ; Then, every four pixels in the feature
map are pooled, weighted value, and bias operation, and the
feature maps of H2 layers are obtained through an activation
function. Further, these feature maps are filtered to obtain
the H3 layer, and this hierarchical structure is the same as
that of H2 to produce H4. Finally, H4 is converted to a vector
and output to fully connected layer. Then classification
results can be obtained.
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had experienced from the design of local feature descriptors
to the research of global feature extraction methods, and
also experienced from statistical learning methods to deep
learning methods. Now, the current face recognition
research is also undergoing improvements from the design
of CNN structure to improve loss function.
III. METHODOLOGY
This section introduces a face image recognition method
based on CNN in detail. As we can see in Fig.1, it
demonstrates the processes of the proposed method.
to be input into the face detection module, and when a face
is detected, the coordinate position of the corresponding
face frame will be output. Note that, the position on upper
left corner is coordinate origin, and the height and width of
the image are respectively the i-axis and j-axis in the plane
rectangular coordinate .
(3) CNN model
In this paper, CNN is widely applied in the field of
image recognition. The feature of "weight sharing" in the
CNN makes the structure of the network very simple. A
deep CNN usually contains some layers, such as input,
convolutional, nonlinear mapping and pooling layers.
Finally, two-dimensional feature is connected into a vector
and input to the final classifier through the fully connected
layer.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Face recognition is essentially a classification problem,
and we evaluate the performance of the proposed method by
precision. The higher the precision is , the better the
performance is .
TP
Precision =
TP + FP
wherein TP and FP are respectively the true positives
and false positives.
 The data set in the experiment is a real-time face image
captured by a computer camera. This data set takes photos
of 10 people, and each person takes 400 face images.In
addition, we divide the obtained dataset into training set
30% and test data set 70%. The purpose of training set is to
train the parameters of CNN, and we verify the accuracy of
face recognition by using the remaining test set. Note that
input face images detected by MTCNN must be first
converted into a grayscale image, and then scaled to a size
of 64 *64, so the size of an input image is 64*64*1. When
the CNN accept N images, the input layer dimension is
N*64*64*1.
In our study, the proposed CNN contains 3
convolutional layers and 1 fully connected layer. The main
framework is as follows:
(1)First convolutional layer: The convolutional layer
uses 32 3*3*1 convolution kernels to convolve the input
layer (32*32*1), and the last number 1 indicates that the
input image is single-channel, so the convolution kernel has
a moving stride of 1. Then, ReLU function is employed to
enhance the fitting ability of the network model, and each
2*2 area needs to be max pooled .
(2)Second convolutional layer: 64 3*3*32 convolution
Fig.3 Training experiment results
V. CONCLUSION
We propose an efficient face recognition based on CNN
in this paper. This method is a technology which extracts
human facial feature information for recognition. In this
scheme, for the color information of color images, we need
to convert color images to gray face image for further
processing, and some color information will be loss.
However, the experiments indicate that the proposed
method is feasible and has a satisfactory precision is our
data set.
Additionally, the color information of color image are
very important in some fields, such as traffic safe area. The
successful application of this technology lays a foundation
of research for the face recognition of color images. In the
next work, we will further consider to improve the precision
of color images recognition in some special applications
which have a higher requirements for the color, brightness
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kernels are used to reconvolve the obtained feature map in
its previous convolutional layer, where 32 refers to 32
convolution kernels in the first convolutional layer, so the
generated feature map is also 32-dimensional.
(3)Third convolutional layer: This layer further uses 64
convolution kernels to convolve the feature maps which
were generated by previous convolution layer, wherein the
size of each convolution kernel is 3*3*64.
(4)Fully connected layer: This layer needs to connect
features learned by convolutional layer with final output
layer. Fully connected layer will pass probability value of
output sample belonging to each category through the
softmax function, then final classification result is one
category which has a largest probability value. Loss
function is defined as the cross-entropy function, and the
error is propagated by gradient descent.
As depicted in Fig.3, at the beginning of training, the
train loss and test loss continue to decline, while the training
set accuracy and test set accuracy also increase, these
indicate that the network is learning. As the network
continues to learn, it slowly became stable, and the training
result maintain in a stable and high recognition rate.
and so on.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported in part in by Guangzhou
Science and Technology Project under Grant
No.202102080656 and No.202002030273, and in part by
Key Discipline Project, Guangzhou Xinhua University with
No.2020XZD02, and in part by the 2021 the ordinary
university key research platform and projects of Guangdong
(No:2021ZDZX1047).
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