  It is well known that deep learning approaches to face recognition and facial
landmark detection suffer from biases in modern training datasets. In this
work, we propose to use synthetic face images to reduce the negative effects of
dataset biases on these tasks. Using a 3D morphable face model, we generate
large amounts of synthetic face images with full control over facial shape and
color, pose, illumination, and background. With a series of experiments, we
extensively test the effects of priming deep nets by pre-training them with
synthetic faces. We observe the following positive effects for face recognition
and facial landmark detection tasks: 1) Priming with synthetic face images
improves the performance consistently across all benchmarks because it reduces
the negative effects of biases in the training data. 2) Traditional approaches
for reducing the damage of dataset bias, such as data augmentation and transfer
learning, are less effective than training with synthetic faces. 3) Using
synthetic data, we can reduce the size of real-world datasets by 75% for face
recognition and by 50% for facial landmark detection while maintaining
performance. Thus, offering a means to focus the data collection process on
less but higher quality data.
