2016/02/12 by Yang Zhong, Zhong, Yang, Josephine Sullivan +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Biometric Identification and Security #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Face and Expression Recognition #Face recognition and analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1602.03935
openalex publication_date 2016/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Predicting attributes from face images in the wild is a challenging computer vision problem. To automatically describe face attributes from face containing images, traditionally one needs to cascade three technical blocks --- face localization, facial descriptor construction, and attribute classification --- in a pipeline. As a typical classification problem, face attribute prediction has been addressed using deep learning. Current state-of-the-art performance was achieved by using two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which were specifically trained to learn face localization and attribute description. In this paper, we experiment with an alternative way of employing the power of deep representations from CNNs. Combining with conventional face localization techniques, we use off-the-shelf architectures trained for face recognition to build facial descriptors. Recognizing that the describable face attributes are diverse, our face descriptors are constructed from different levels of the CNNs for different attributes to best facilitate face attribute prediction. Experiments on two large datasets, LFWA and CelebA, show that our approach is entirely comparable to the state-of-the-art. Our findings not only demonstrate an efficient face attribute prediction approach, but also raise an important question: how to leverage the power of off-the-shelf CNN representations for novel tasks.