R³ Adversarial Network for Cross Model Face Recognition

In this paper, we raise a new problem, namely cross model face recognition (CMFR), which has considerable economic and social significance. The core of this problem is to make features extracted from different models comparable. However, the diversity, mainly caused by different application scenarios, frequent version updating, and all sorts of service platforms, obstructs interaction among different models and poses a great challenge. To solve this problem, from the perspective of Bayesian modelling, we propose R
³
Adversarial Network (R3AN) which consists of three paths: Reconstruction, Representation and Regression. We also introduce adversarial learning into the reconstruction path for better performance. Comprehensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the feasibility of interaction among different models with the proposed framework. When updating the gallery, R
³
AN conducts the feature transformation nearly 10 times faster than ResNet-101. Meanwhile, the transformed feature distribution is very close to that of target model, and its error rate is incredibly reduced by approximately 75% compared with a naive transformation model. Furthermore, we show that face feature can be deciphered into original face image roughly by the reconstruction path, which may give valuable hints for improving the original face recognition models.