Papers › SynFace: Face Recognition with Synthetic Data

SynFace: Face Recognition with Synthetic Data

18 Aug 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2108.07960archive 2025-07-28

Haibo Qiu, Baosheng Yu, Dihong Gong, Zhifeng Li, Wei Liu, DaCheng Tao

With the recent success of deep neural networks, remarkable progress has been achieved on face recognition. However, collecting large-scale real-world training data for face recognition has turned out to be challenging, especially due to the label noise and privacy issues. Meanwhile, existing face recognition datasets are usually collected from web images, lacking detailed annotations on attributes (e.g., pose and expression), so the influences of different attributes on face recognition have been poorly investigated. In this paper, we address the above-mentioned issues in face recognition using synthetic face images, i.e., SynFace. Specifically, we first explore the performance gap between recent state-of-the-art face recognition models trained with synthetic and real face images. We then analyze the underlying causes behind the performance gap, e.g., the poor intra-class variations and the domain gap between synthetic and real face images. Inspired by this, we devise the SynFace with identity mixup (IM) and domain mixup (DM) to mitigate the above performance gap, demonstrating the great potentials of synthetic data for face recognition. Furthermore, with the controllable face synthesis model, we can easily manage different factors of synthetic face generation, including pose, expression, illumination, the number of identities, and samples per identity. Therefore, we also perform a systematically empirical analysis on synthetic face images to provide some insights on how to effectively utilize synthetic data for face recognition.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

haibo-qiu/SynFace officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Face GenerationFace Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Mixup

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections