Face image quality is an important factor to enable high-performance face recognition systems. Face quality assessment aims at estimating the suitability of a face image for the purpose of recognition. Previous work proposed supervised solutions that require artificially or human labelled quality values. However, both labelling mechanisms are error prone as they do not rely on a clear definition of quality and may not know the best characteristics for the utilized face recognition system. Avoiding the use of inaccurate quality labels, we proposed a novel concept to measure face quality based on an arbitrary face recognition model. By determining the embedding variations generated from random subnetworks of a face model, the robustness of a sample representation and thus, its quality is estimated. The experiments are conducted in a cross-database evaluation setting on three publicly available databases. We compare our proposed solution on two face embeddings against six state-of-the-art approaches from academia and industry. The results show that our unsupervised solution outperforms all other approaches in the majority of the investigated scenarios. In contrast to previous works, the proposed solution shows a stable performance over all scenarios. Utilizing the deployed face recognition model for our face quality assessment methodology avoids the training phase completely and further outperforms all baseline approaches by a large margin. Our solution can be easily integrated into current face recognition systems, and can be modified to other tasks beyond face recognition.

Face recognition (FR) systems have a growing effect on critical decision-making processes. Recent works have shown that FR solutions show strong performance differences based on the user’s demographics. However, to enable a trustworthy FR technology, it is essential to know the influence of an extended range of facial attributes on FR beyond demographics. Therefore, in this work, we analyze FR bias over a wide range of attributes. We investigate the influence of 47 attributes on the verification performance of two popular FR models. The experiments were performed on the publicly available MAAD-Face attribute database with over 120M high-quality attribute annotations. To prevent misleading statements about biased performances, we introduced control group-based validity values to decide if unbalanced test data causes the performance differences. The results demonstrate that also many nondemographic attributes strongly affect recognition performance, such as accessories, hairstyles and colors, face shapes, or facial anomalies. The observations of this work show the strong need for further advances in making the FR system more robust, explainable, and fair. Moreover, our findings might help to a better understanding of how FR networks work, enhance the robustness of these networks, and develop more generalized bias-mitigating FR solutions.

Sensors are devices that quantify the physical aspects of the world around us. This ability is important to gain knowledge about human activities. Human Activity recognition plays an import role in people's everyday life. In order to solve many human-centered problems, such as health care, and individual assistance, the need to infer various simple to complex human activities is prominent. Therefore, having a well defined categorization of sensing technology is essential for the systematic design of human activity recognition systems. By extending the sensor categorization proposed by White, we survey the most prominent research works that utilize different sensing technologies for human activity recognition tasks. To the best of our knowledge, there is no thorough sensor-driven survey that considers all sensor categories in the domain of human activity recognition with respect to the sampled physical properties, including a detailed comparison across sensor categories. Thus, our contribution is to close this gap by providing an insight into the state-of-the-art developments. We identify the limitations with respect to the hardware and software characteristics of each sensor category and draw comparisons based on benchmark features retrieved from the research works introduced in this survey. Finally, we conclude with general remarks and provide future research directions for human activity recognition within the presented sensor categorization.

Deep neural networks have rapidly become the mainstream method for face recognition (FR). However, this limits the deployment of such models that contain an extremely large number of parameters to embedded and low-end devices. In this work, we present an extremely lightweight and accurate FR solution, namely PocketNet. We utilize neural architecture search to develop a new family of lightweight face-specific architectures. We additionally propose a novel training paradigm based on knowledge distillation (KD), the multi-step KD, where the knowledge is distilled from the teacher model to the student model at different stages of the training maturity. We conduct a detailed ablation study proving both, the sanity of using NAS for the specific task of FR rather than general object classification, and the benefits of our proposed multi-step KD. We present an extensive experimental evaluation and comparisons with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) compact FR models on nine different benchmarks including large-scale evaluation benchmarks such as IJB-C and MegaFace. PocketNets have consistently advanced the SOTA FR performance on nine mainstream benchmarks when considering the same level of model compactness. With 0.92M parameters, our smallest network PocketNetS-128 achieved very competitive results to recent SOTA compacted models that contain up to 4M parameters. Training codes and pre-trained models are public. ¹

In this paper, we present a set of extremely efficient and high throughput models for accurate face verification, Mix-FaceNets which are inspired by Mixed Depthwise Convolutional Kernels. Extensive experiment evaluations on Label Face in the Wild (LFW), Age-DB, MegaFace, and IARPA Janus Benchmarks IJB-B and IJB-C datasets have shown the effectiveness of our MixFaceNets for applications requiring extremely low computational complexity. Under the same level of computation complexity (≤ 500M FLOPs), our MixFaceNets outperform MobileFaceNets on all the evaluated datasets, achieving 99.60% accuracy on LFW, 97.05% accuracy on AgeDB-30, 93.60 TAR (at FAR1e-6) on MegaFace, 90.94 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-B and 93.08 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-C. With computational complexity between 500M and 1G FLOPs, our MixFaceNets achieved results comparable to the top-ranked models, while using significantly fewer FLOPs and less computation over-head, which proves the practical value of our proposed Mix-FaceNets. All training codes, pre-trained models, and training logs have been made available https://github.com/fdbtrs/mixfacenets.