Papers › Probabilistic Face Embeddings

Probabilistic Face Embeddings

21 Apr 2019ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1904.09658archive 2025-07-28

Yichun Shi, Anil K. Jain

Embedding methods have achieved success in face recognition by comparing facial features in a latent semantic space. However, in a fully unconstrained face setting, the facial features learned by the embedding model could be ambiguous or may not even be present in the input face, leading to noisy representations. We propose Probabilistic Face Embeddings (PFEs), which represent each face image as a Gaussian distribution in the latent space. The mean of the distribution estimates the most likely feature values while the variance shows the uncertainty in the feature values. Probabilistic solutions can then be naturally derived for matching and fusing PFEs using the uncertainty information. Empirical evaluation on different baseline models, training datasets and benchmarks show that the proposed method can improve the face recognition performance of deterministic embeddings by converting them into PFEs. The uncertainties estimated by PFEs also serve as good indicators of the potential matching accuracy, which are important for a risk-controlled recognition system.

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Tasks

Face RecognitionFace Verification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Verification IJB-A PFEfuse + match TAR @ FAR=0.001 95.25 #2 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification IJB-A PFEfuse + match TAR @ FAR=0.01 97.5% #2 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification IJB-C PFEfuse + match TAR @ FAR=1e-2 97.17% #22 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification IJB-C PFEfuse + match TAR @ FAR=1e-3 95.49% #22 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification IJB-C PFEfuse + match model SphereFace64 #22 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification IJB-C PFEfuse + match training dataset MS1M V2 #22 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification MegaFace PFEfuse + match Accuracy 92.51% #9 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Face Verification YouTube Faces DB PFEfuse+match Accuracy 97.36% #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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