Face verification using large feature sets and one shot similarity

We present a method for face verification that combines Partial Least Squares (PLS) and the One-Shot similarity model[28]. First, a large feature set combining shape, texture and color information is used to describe a face. Then PLS is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the feature set with multi-channel feature weighting. This provides a discriminative facial descriptor. PLS regression is used to compute the similarity score of an image pair by One-Shot learning. Given two feature vector representing face images, the One-Shot algorithm learns discriminative models exclusively for the vectors being compared. A small set of unlabeled images, not containing images belonging to the people being compared, is used as a reference (negative) set. The approach is evaluated on the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) benchmark and shows very comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods (achieving 86.12% classification accuracy) while maintaining simplicity and good generalization ability.