Second FRCSyn-onGoing: Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analysis to Improve Face Recognition with Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or the ability to customize it to adapt to specific problem-solving needs. To effectively use such data, face recognition models should also be specifically designed to exploit synthetic data to its fullest potential. In order to promote the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and investigate the application of synthetic data to better train face recognition systems, we introduce the 2nd FRCSyn-onGoing challenge, based on the 2nd Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn), originally launched at CVPR 2024. This is an ongoing challenge that provides researchers with an accessible platform to benchmark i) the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and ii) novel face recognition systems that are specifically proposed to take advantage of synthetic data. We focus on exploring the use of synthetic data both individually and in combination with real data to solve current challenges in face recognition such as demographic bias, domain adaptation, and performance constraints in demanding situations, such as age disparities between training and testing, changes in the pose, or occlusions. Very interesting findings are obtained in this second edition, including a direct comparison with the first one, in which synthetic databases were restricted to DCFace and GANDiffFace.

TCDiff: Triple Condition Diffusion Model with 3D Constraints for Stylizing Synthetic Faces

A robust face recognition model must be trained using datasets that include a large number of subjects and numerous samples per subject under varying conditions (such as pose, expression, age, noise, and occlusion). Due to ethical and privacy concerns, large-scale real face datasets have been discontinued, such as MS1MV3, and synthetic face generators have been proposed, utilizing GANs and Diffusion Models, such as SYNFace, SFace, DigiFace-1M, IDiff-Face, DCFace, and GANDiffFace, aiming to supply this demand. Some of these methods can produce high-fidelity realistic faces, but with low intra-class variance, while others generate high-variance faces with low identity consistency. In this paper, we propose a Triple Condition Diffusion Model (TCDiff) to improve face style transfer from real to synthetic faces through 2D and 3D facial constraints, enhancing face identity consistency while keeping the necessary high intra-class variance. Face recognition experiments using 1k, 2k, and 5k classes of our new dataset for training outperform state-of-the-art synthetic datasets in real face benchmarks such as LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, and BUPT. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/BOVIFOCR/tcdiff.

Second Edition FRCSyn Challenge at CVPR 2024: Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is gaining increasing relevance for training machine learning models. This is mainly motivated due to several factors such as the lack of real data and intra-class variability, time and errors produced in manual labeling, and in some cases privacy concerns, among others. This paper presents an overview of the 2nd edition of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at CVPR 2024. FRCSyn aims to investigate the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address current technological limitations, including data privacy concerns, demographic biases, generalization to novel scenarios, and performance constraints in challenging situations such as aging, pose variations, and occlusions. Unlike the 1st edition, in which synthetic data from DCFace and GANDiffFace methods was only allowed to train face recognition systems, in this 2nd edition we propose new sub-tasks that allow participants to explore novel face generative methods. The outcomes of the 2nd FRCSyn Challenge, along with the proposed experimental protocol and benchmarking contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to face recognition.