A study on the use of Boundary Equilibrium GAN for Approximate Frontalization of Unconstrained Faces to aid in Surveillance

TL;DR

This paper explores using a Boundary Equilibrium GAN with spherical linear interpolation to generate approximate frontal faces from side views in surveillance footage, aiming to improve face recognition in unconstrained conditions.

Contribution

The study implements a BEGAN with Slerp for face frontalization, enhancing output quality and training stability for surveillance applications.

Findings

Produced promising frontalization results from side views

Achieved faster and more stable training process

Prevented mode collapse with balanced generator-discriminator

Abstract

Face frontalization is the process of synthesizing frontal facing views of faces given its angled poses. We implement a generative adversarial network (GAN) with spherical linear interpolation (Slerp) for frontalization of unconstrained facial images. Our special focus is intended towards the generation of approximate frontal faces of the side posed images captured from surveillance cameras. Specifically, the present work is a comprehensive study on the implementation of an auto-encoder based Boundary Equilibrium GAN (BEGAN) to generate frontal faces using an interpolation of a side view face and its mirrored view. To increase the quality of the interpolated output we implement a BEGAN with Slerp. This approach could produce a promising output along with a faster and more stable training for the model. The BEGAN model additionally has a balanced generator-discriminator combination, which prevents mode collapse along with a global convergence measure. It is expected that such an approximate face generation model would be able to replace face composites used in surveillance and crime detection.