  The objective of this work is set-based verification, e.g. to decide if two
sets of images of a face are of the same person or not. The traditional
approach to this problem is to learn to generate a feature vector per image,
aggregate them into one vector to represent the set, and then compute the
cosine similarity between sets. Instead, we design a neural network
architecture that can directly learn set-wise verification. Our contributions
are: (i) We propose a Deep Comparator Network (DCN) that can ingest a pair of
sets (each may contain a variable number of images) as inputs, and compute a
similarity between the pair--this involves attending to multiple discriminative
local regions (landmarks), and comparing local descriptors between pairs of
faces; (ii) To encourage high-quality representations for each set, internal
competition is introduced for recalibration based on the landmark score; (iii)
Inspired by image retrieval, a novel hard sample mining regime is proposed to
control the sampling process, such that the DCN is complementary to the
standard image classification models. Evaluations on the IARPA Janus face
recognition benchmarks show that the comparator networks outperform the
previous state-of-the-art results by a large margin.
