Tom-vs-Pete Classifiers and Identity-Preserving Alignment for Face Verification

We propose a method of face verification that takes advantage of a reference set of faces, disjoint by identity from the test faces, labeled with identity and face part locations. The reference set is used in two ways. First, we use it to perform an identity-preserving alignment, warping the faces in a way that reduces differences due to pose and expression but preserves differences that indicate identity. Second, using the aligned faces, we learn a large set of identity classifiers, each trained on images of just two people. We call these Tom-vs-Pete classifiers to stress their binary nature. We assemble a collection of these classifiers able to discriminate among a wide variety of subjects and use their outputs as features in a same-or-different classifier on face pairs. We evaluate our method on the Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark, achieving an accuracy of 93.10%, significantly improving on the published state of the art.