Vec2Face+ for Face Dataset Generation

TL;DR

Vec2Face+ is a novel generative model that creates high-quality, diverse, and identity-consistent face datasets directly from image features, surpassing real datasets in face recognition accuracy.

Contribution

We introduce Vec2Face+, a new generative approach for synthesizing face datasets with controllable identities and attributes, achieving state-of-the-art recognition performance with synthetic data.

Findings

Synthetic datasets outperform CASIA-WebFace in face recognition accuracy.

Only 1 out of 11 synthetic datasets surpasses random guessing in twin verification.

Models trained on synthetic identities exhibit more bias than those trained on real identities.

Abstract

When synthesizing identities as face recognition training data, it is generally believed that large inter-class separability and intra-class attribute variation are essential for synthesizing a quality dataset. % This belief is generally correct, and this is what we aim for. However, when increasing intra-class variation, existing methods overlook the necessity of maintaining intra-class identity consistency. % To address this and generate high-quality face training data, we propose Vec2Face+, a generative model that creates images directly from image features and allows for continuous and easy control of face identities and attributes. Using Vec2Face+, we obtain datasets with proper inter-class separability and intra-class variation and identity consistency using three strategies: 1) we sample vectors sufficiently different from others to generate well-separated identities; 2) we propose an AttrOP algorithm for increasing general attribute variations; 3) we propose LoRA-based pose control for generating images with profile head poses, which is more efficient and identity-preserving than AttrOP. % Our system generates VFace10K, a synthetic face dataset with 10K identities, which allows an FR model to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on seven real-world test sets. Scaling the size to 4M and 12M images, the corresponding VFace100K and VFace300K datasets yield higher accuracy than the real-world training dataset, CASIA-WebFace, on five real-world test sets. This is the first time a synthetic dataset beats the CASIA-WebFace in average accuracy. In addition, we find that only 1 out of 11 synthetic datasets outperforms random guessing (\emph{i.e., 50\%}) in twin verification and that models trained with synthetic identities are more biased than those trained with real identities. Both are important aspects for future investigation. Code is available at https://github.com/HaiyuWu/Vec2Face_plus