FT-GAN: Face transformation with key points alignment for pose-invariant face recognition

Abstract

Face recognition has been comprehensively studied. However, face recognition in the wild still suffers from unconstrained face directions. Frontal face synthesis is a popular solution, but some facial features are missed after synthesis. This paper presents a novel method for pose-invariant face recognition. It is based on face transformation with key points alignment based on generative adversarial networks (FT-GAN). In this method, we introduce CycleGAN for pixel transformation to achieve coarse face transformation results, and these results are refined by key point alignment. In this way, frontal face synthesis is modeled as a two-task process. The results of comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of FT-GAN.