FM2u-Net: Face Morphological Multi-Branch Network for Makeup-Invariant Face Verification

It is challenging in learning a makeup-invariant face verification model, due to (1) insufficient makeup/non-makeup face training pairs, (2) the lack of diverse makeup faces, and (3) the significant appearance changes caused by cosmetics. To address these challenges, we propose a unified Face Morphological Multi-branch Network (FMMu-Net) for makeup-invariant face verification, which can simultaneously synthesize many diverse makeup faces through face morphology network (FM-Net) and effectively learn cosmetics-robust face representations using attention-based multi-branch learning network (AttM-Net). For challenges (1) and (2), FM-Net (two stacked auto-encoders) can synthesize realistic makeup face images by transferring specific regions of cosmetics via cycle consistent loss. For challenge (3), AttM-Net, consisting of one global and three local (task-driven on two eyes and mouth) branches, can effectively capture the complementary holistic and detailed information. Unlike DeepID2 which uses simple concatenation fusion, we introduce a heuristic method AttM-FM, attached to AttM-Net, to adaptively weight the features of different branches guided by the holistic information. We conduct extensive experiments on makeup face verification benchmarks (M-501, M-203, and FAM) and general face recognition datasets (LFW and IJB-A). Our framework FMMu-Net achieves state-of-the-art performances.