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Title: CATFace: Cross-Attribute-Guided Transformer With Self-Attention Distillation for Low-Quality Face Recognition
Although face recognition (FR) has achieved great success in recent years, it is still challenging to accurately recognize faces in low-quality images due to the obscured facial details. Nevertheless, it is often feasible to make predictions about specific soft biometric (SB) attributes, such as gender, age, and baldness even in dealing with low-quality images. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-branch neural network that leverages SB attribute information to boost the performance of FR. To this ed, we propose a cross-attribute-guided transformer fusion (CATF) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies and relationships between FR and SB feature representations. The synergy created by the reciprocal flow of information in the dual cross-attention operations of the proposed CATF module enhances the performance of FR. Furthermore, we introduce a novel self-attention distillation framework that effectively highlights crucial facial regions, such as landmarks by aligning low-quality images with those of their high-quality counterparts in the feature space. The proposed self-attention distillation regularizes our network. to learn a unified quality-invariant feature representation in unconstrained environments. We conduct extensive experiments on various real-world FR benchmarks varying in quality. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our FR method compared to state-of-the-art FR studies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1650474
PAR ID:
10496377
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science
Volume:
6
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2637-6407
Page Range / eLocation ID:
132 to 146
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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