Learning an attention-aware parallel sharing network for facial attribute recognition

Existing multi-task learning based facial attribute recognition (FAR) methods usually employ the serial sharing network, where the high-level global features are used for attribute prediction. However, the shared low-level features with valuable spatial information are not well exploited for multiple tasks. This paper proposes a novel Attention-aware Parallel Sharing network termed APS for effective FAR. To make full use of the shared low-level features, the task-specific sub-networks can adaptively extract important features from each block of the shared sub-network. Furthermore, an effective attention mechanism with multi-feature soft-alignment modules is employed to evaluate the compatibility of the local and global features from the different network levels for discriminating attributes. In addition, an adaptive Focal loss penalty scheme is developed to automatically assign weights to handle the problems of class imbalance and hard example mining for FAR. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art FAR methods.