Transferring and compressing convolutional neural networks for face representations

In this work we have investigated face verification based on deep representations from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to find an accurate and compact face descriptor trained only on a restricted amount of face image data. Transfer learning by fine-tuning CNNs pre-trained on large-scale object recognition has been shown to be a suitable approach to counter a limited amount of target domain data. Using model compression we reduced the model complexity without significant loss in accuracy and made the feature extraction more feasible for real-time use and deployment on embedded systems and mobile devices. The compression resulted in a 9-fold reduction in number of parameters and a 5-fold speed-up in the average feature extraction time running on a desktop CPU. With continued training of the compressed model using a Siamese Network setup, it outperformed the larger model.