Cosine similarity metric learning for face verification

Abstract

Face verification is the task of deciding by analyzing face images, whether a person is who he/she claims to be. This is very challenging due to image variations in lighting, pose, facial expression, and age. The task boils down to computing the distance between two face vectors. As such, appropriate distance metrics are essential for face verification accuracy. In this paper we propose a new method, named the Cosine Similarity Metric Learning (CSML) for learning a distance metric for facial verification. The use of cosine similarity in our method leads to an effective learning algorithm which can improve the generalization ability of any given metric. Our method is tested on the state-of-the-art dataset, the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), and has achieved the highest accuracy in the literature. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.