Self-paced Robust Deep Face Recognition with Label Noise

Deep face recognition has achieved rapid development but still suffers from occlusions, illumination and pose variations, especially for face identification. The success of deep learning models in face recognition lies in large-scale high quality face data with accurate labels. However, in real-world applications, the collected data may be mixed with severe label noise, which significantly degrades the generalization ability of deep models. To alleviate the impact of label noise on face recognition, inspired by curriculum learning, we propose a self-paced deep learning model (SPDL) by introducing a negative \(l_1\)-norm regularizer for face recognition with label noise. During training, SPDL automatically evaluates the cleanness of samples in each batch and chooses cleaner samples for training while abandons the noisy samples. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SPDL, we use deep convolution neural network architectures for the task of robust face recognition. Experimental results show that our SPDL achieves superior performance on LFW, MegaFace and YTF when there are different levels of label noise.