AutoFace: How to obtain mobile neural network-based facial feature extractor in less than 10 minutes?

IEEE Access. 2024. Vol. 12. P. 25106–25118.

Савченко А. В.

Various mobile and edge devices have significantly different processing capabilities, making it challenging to develop a single universal architecture of a neural network to extract facial embeddings. In this paper, we study the automated machine learning techniques to design a neural network with the best performance on a concrete device. The novel procedure is proposed to choose the better subnetwork of the Supernet based on a genetic algorithm with a surrogate binary classifier to compare the expected accuracy of two subnetworks. The latter uses only encoding of a candidate subnetwork and does not require directly estimating its accuracy on a validation set. As a result, the most computationally efficient and accurate model in TensorFlow Lite format is obtained in less than 10 minutes for a specific device and latency constraint. An Android demo application has been developed to demonstrate the potential of designed neural networks. It is experimentally shown that the proposed approach is universal: it can extract deep embeddings for tasks such as face verification and facial expression recognition and for various types of devices, including smartphones and Raspberry Pi single-board mini-computers. Our models process one facial image in real-time and achieve much higher accuracy when compared to the best-known lightweight networks.

Ключевые слова: genetic algorithms, mobile applications, evolutionary search, face verification, edge devices, facial expression recognition (FER)