Cost-sensitive face recognition

Yin Zhang, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Abstract: Traditional face recognition systems attempt to achieve a high recognition accuracy, which implicitly assumes that the losses of all misclassifications are the same. However, in many real-world tasks this assumption is not always reasonable. For example, it will be troublesome if a face-recognition-based door-locker misclassifies a family member as a stranger such that s/he were not allowed to enter the house; but it will be a much more serious disaster if a stranger were misclassified as a family member and allowed to enter the house. In this paper, we propose a framework which formulates the problem as a multi-class cost-sensitive learning task, and propose a theoretically sound method based on Bayes decision theory to solve this problem. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.