Face Verification Using the LARK Representation

We present a novel face representation based on locally adaptive regression kernel (LARK) descriptors. Our LARK descriptor measures a self-similarity based on signal-induced distance between a center pixel and surrounding pixels in a local neighborhood. By applying principal component analysis (PCA) and a logistic function to LARK consecutively, we develop a new binary-like face representation which achieves state-of-the-art face verification performance on the challenging benchmark Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. In the case where training data are available, we employ one-shot similarity (OSS) based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the unsupervised setting and the image restrictive training setting (72.23% and 78.90% verification rates), respectively, as a single descriptor representation, with no preprocessing step. As opposed to combined 30 distances which achieve 85.13%, we achieve comparable performance (85.1%) with only 14 distances while significantly reducing computational complexity.