  Face images in the wild undergo large intra-personal variations, such as
poses, illuminations, occlusions, and low resolutions, which cause great
challenges to face-related applications. This paper addresses this challenge by
proposing a new deep learning framework that can recover the canonical view of
face images. It dramatically reduces the intra-person variances, while
maintaining the inter-person discriminativeness. Unlike the existing face
reconstruction methods that were either evaluated in controlled 2D environment
or employed 3D information, our approach directly learns the transformation
from the face images with a complex set of variations to their canonical views.
At the training stage, to avoid the costly process of labeling canonical-view
images from the training set by hand, we have devised a new measurement to
automatically select or synthesize a canonical-view image for each identity. As
an application, this face recovery approach is used for face verification.
Facial features are learned from the recovered canonical-view face images by
using a facial component-based convolutional neural network. Our approach
achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the LFW dataset.
