Deep Learning Face Representation from Predicting 10,000 Classes

This paper proposes to learn a set of high-level featurerepresentations through deep learning, referred to as Deephidden IDentity features (DeepID), for face verification.We argue that DeepID can be effectively learned throughchallenging multi-class face identification tasks, whilst theycan be generalized to other tasks (such as verification) andnew identities unseen in the training set. Moreover, thegeneralization capability of DeepID increases as more faceclasses are to be predicted at training. DeepID featuresare taken from the last hidden layer neuron activations ofdeep convolutional networks (ConvNets). When learnedas classifiers to recognize about 10, 000 face identities inthe training set and configured to keep reducing the neuronnumbers along the feature extraction hierarchy, these deepConvNets gradually form compact identity-related featuresin the top layers with only a small number of hiddenneurons. The proposed features are extracted from variousface regions to form complementary and over-completerepresentations. Any state-of-the-art classifiers can belearned based on these high-level representations for faceverification. 97.45% verification accuracy on LFW isachieved with only weakly aligned faces