  The large pose discrepancy between two face images is one of the fundamental
challenges in automatic face recognition. Conventional approaches to
pose-invariant face recognition either perform face frontalization on, or learn
a pose-invariant representation from, a non-frontal face image. We argue that
it is more desirable to perform both tasks jointly to allow them to leverage
each other. To this end, this paper proposes a Disentangled Representation
learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DR-GAN) with three distinct novelties.
First, the encoder-decoder structure of the generator enables DR-GAN to learn a
representation that is both generative and discriminative, which can be used
for face image synthesis and pose-invariant face recognition. Second, this
representation is explicitly disentangled from other face variations such as
pose, through the pose code provided to the decoder and pose estimation in the
discriminator. Third, DR-GAN can take one or multiple images as the input, and
generate one unified identity representation along with an arbitrary number of
synthetic face images. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation on a
number of controlled and in-the-wild databases demonstrate the superiority of
DR-GAN over the state of the art in both learning representations and rotating
large-pose face images.
