LAUSR

Face masks bring a new challenge to face recognition systems especially against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, a method mitigating the negative effects of mask defects on face recognition is proposed. Firstly, a low-cost, accurate method of masked face synthesis, i.e. mask transfer, is proposed for data augmentation. Secondly, an attention-aware masked face recognition (AMaskNet) is proposed to improve the performance of masked face recognition, which includes two modules: a feature extractor and a contribution estimator. Therein, the contribution estimator is employed to learn the contribution of the feature elements, thus achieving refined feature representation by simple matrix multiplications. Meanwhile, the end-to-end training strategy is utilized to optimize the entire model. Finally, a mask-aware similarity matching strategy(MS) is taken to improve the performance in the inference stage. The experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms on three masked face recognition datasets: RMFRD [1], COX [2] and Public-IvS [3]. Meanwhile, qualitative analysis experiments using CAM [4] indicate that the contribution learned by AMaskNet is more conducive to masked face recognition.