  This paper targets on the problem of set to set recognition, which learns the
metric between two image sets. Images in each set belong to the same identity.
Since images in a set can be complementary, they hopefully lead to higher
accuracy in practical applications. However, the quality of each sample cannot
be guaranteed, and samples with poor quality will hurt the metric. In this
paper, the quality aware network (QAN) is proposed to confront this problem,
where the quality of each sample can be automatically learned although such
information is not explicitly provided in the training stage. The network has
two branches, where the first branch extracts appearance feature embedding for
each sample and the other branch predicts quality score for each sample.
Features and quality scores of all samples in a set are then aggregated to
generate the final feature embedding. We show that the two branches can be
trained in an end-to-end manner given only the set-level identity annotation.
Analysis on gradient spread of this mechanism indicates that the quality
learned by the network is beneficial to set-to-set recognition and simplifies
the distribution that the network needs to fit. Experiments on both face
verification and person re-identification show advantages of the proposed QAN.
The source code and network structure can be downloaded at
https://github.com/sciencefans/Quality-Aware-Network.
