A standard pipeline of current face recognition frameworks consists of four individual steps: locating a face with a rough bounding box and several fiducial landmarks, aligning the face image using a pre-defined template, extracting representations and comparing. Among them, face detection, landmark detection and representation learning have long been studied and a lot of works have been proposed. As an important step with a big impact on recognition performance, the alignment step has attracted little attention. In this paper, we first explore and highlight the effects of different alignment templates on face recognition. Then, for the first time, we try to automatically search for the optimal template. We construct a well-defined searching space by decomposing the template searching into the crop size and vertical shift, and propose an efficient method Face Alignment Policy Search (FAPS). Besides, a well-designed benchmark is proposed to evaluate the searched policy. Experiments on our proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method to improve the face recognition performance.

An emerging line of research has found that spherical spaces better match the underlying geometry of facial im-ages, as evidenced by the state-of-the-art facial recognition methods which benefit empirically from spherical representations. Yet, these approaches rely on deterministic embeddings and hence suffer from the feature ambiguity dilemma, whereby ambiguous or noisy images are mapped into poorly learned regions of representation space, leading to inaccuracies. Probabilistic Face Embeddings (PFE) [17] is the first attempt to address this dilemma. However, we theoretically and empirically identify two main failures of PFE when it is applied to spherical deterministic embeddings aforementioned. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for face confidence learning in spherical space. Mathematically, we extend the von Mises Fisher density to its r-radius counterpart and derive a new optimization objective in closed form. Theoretically, the proposed probabilistic framework provably allows for better interpretability, leading to principled feature comparison and pooling. Extensive experimental results on multiple challenging benchmarks confirm our hypothesis and theory, and showcase the advantages of our framework over prior probabilistic methods and spherical deterministic embed-dings in various face recognition tasks.

With the development of mobile devices, it is hopeful and pressing to deploy face recognition and face anti-spoofing (FAS) model on cell phone or portable devices. Most of existing face anti-spoofing methods focus on building computational costly detector for better spoofing face detection performance. However, these detectors are unfriendly to be deployed on the mobile device for real-time FAS applications. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search (NAS) based method called Auto-FAS, intending to discover well-suitable lightweight networks for mobile-level face anti-spoofing. In Auto-FAS, a special search space is designed to restrict the model's size, and pixel-wise binary supervision is used to improve the model's performance. We demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach on three public benchmark datasets, which shows the potential real-time FAS application for mobile devices.

Treating visual tracking as a matching problem, siamese architecture has drawn increasing interest recently. In this paper, we propose a novel siamese recurrent architecture that can enhance the similarity matching by leveraging contextual information. Specifically, the multi-directional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is employed to memorize the long-range contextual dependencies of object parts and learn the self-structure information of the object. We test the proposed method on a challenging benchmark, and it gain promising results compared with the existing tracking algorithms.