CNN combined with data augmentation for face recognition on small dataset

Abstract

Faces have universal structures yet contain distinct features among individuals. Recognizing individuals based on their faces has always been a popular topic in pattern recognition, and computer vision and many traditional approaches have yielded satisfying results. In recent years, rapid growth in deep learning has encouraged researchers to use deep learning methods to solve authentication problems. Convolutional neural networks are one of the most popular deep neural networks with multiple layers and the ability to reduce parameters by using kernels to capture features from input. It has outstanding performance in pattern recognition due to its ability to extract features and take images as inputs. In machine learning, data augmentation is a technique to seemingly enlarge a dataset to avoid underfitting or overfitting problems caused by insufficient data. This paper uses convolutional neural networks to solve face recognition problems on a small dataset. It compares performance with traditional face recognition methods such as Principal Component Analysis and examines the impact on performance using data augmentation. Overall, data augmentation boosts the accuracy of the network but also results in an unsteady learning curve. The convolutional neural network performs well on pattern recognition and obtains an accuracy of 94% in an augmented dataset with only two convolutional layers.