Conditional Convolutional Neural Network for Modality-Aware Face Recognition

Faces in the wild are usually captured with various poses, illuminations and occlusions, and thus inherently multimodally distributed in many tasks. We propose a conditional Convolutional Neural Network, named as c-CNN, to handle multimodal face recognition. Different from traditional CNN that adopts fixed convolution kernels, samples in c-CNN are processed with dynamically activated sets of kernels. In particular, convolution kernels within each layer are only sparsely activated when a sample is passed through the network. For a given sample, the activations of convolution kernels in a certain layer are conditioned on its present intermediate representation and the activation status in the lower layers. The activated kernels across layers define the sample-specific adaptive routes that reveal the distribution of underlying modalities. Consequently, the proposed framework does not rely on any prior knowledge of modalities in contrast with most existing methods. To substantiate the generic framework, we introduce a special case of c-CNN via incorporating the conditional routing of the decision tree, which is evaluated with two problems of multimodality - multi-view face identification and occluded face verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the counterparts unaware of modalities.