SD-GAN: Structural and Denoising GAN reveals facial parts under occlusion

Abstract: Certain facial parts are salient (unique) in appearance, which substantially contribute to the holistic recognition of a subject. Occlusion of these salient parts deteriorates the performance of face recognition algorithms. In this paper, we propose a generative model to reconstruct the missing parts of the face which are under occlusion. The proposed generative model (SD-GAN) reconstructs a face preserving the illumination variation and identity of the face. A novel adversarial training algorithm has been designed for a bimodal mutually exclusive Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model, for faster convergence. A novel adversarial "structural" loss function is also proposed, comprising of two components: a holistic and a local loss, characterized by SSIM and patch-wise MSE. Ablation studies on real and synthetically occluded face datasets reveal that our proposed technique outperforms the competing methods by a considerable margin, even for boosting the performance of Face Recognition.