The performance of many state-of-the-art deep face recognition models deteriorates significantly for im-ages captured under low illumination, mainly because the features of dim probe face images cannot match well with those of normal-illumination gallery images. The issue cannot be satisfactorily addressed by enhancing the illumination of face images and performing face recognition on the resulted images alone. We propose a novel deep face recognition framework that consists of a feature restoration net -work, a feature extraction network, and an embedding matching module. The feature restoration network adopts a two-branch structure based on the convolutional neural network to generate a feature image from the raw image and the illumination-enhanced image. The feature extraction network encodes the feature image into an embedding, which is then used by the embedding matching module for face verifi-cation and identification. The overall verification accuracy is improved from 1.1% to 6.7% when tested on the Specs on Faces (SoF) dataset. For face identification, the rank-1 identification accuracy is improved by 2.8%. (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Face recognitionDim imageRank-1 identification accuracyTwo-branch networkConvolutional neural networkHISTOGRAM EQUALIZATION
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