  Pushing by big data and deep convolutional neural network (CNN), the
performance of face recognition is becoming comparable to human. Using private
large scale training datasets, several groups achieve very high performance on
LFW, i.e., 97% to 99%. While there are many open source implementations of CNN,
none of large scale face dataset is publicly available. The current situation
in the field of face recognition is that data is more important than algorithm.
To solve this problem, this paper proposes a semi-automatical way to collect
face images from Internet and builds a large scale dataset containing about
10,000 subjects and 500,000 images, called CASIAWebFace. Based on the database,
we use a 11-layer CNN to learn discriminative representation and obtain
state-of-theart accuracy on LFW and YTF. The publication of CASIAWebFace will
attract more research groups entering this field and accelerate the development
of face recognition in the wild.
