Face Beneath the Ink: Synthetic Data and Tattoo Removal with Application to Face Recognition

Systems that analyse faces have seen significant improvements in recent years and are today used in numerous application scenarios. However, these systems have been found to be negatively affected by facial alterations such as tattoos. To better understand and mitigate the effect of facial tattoos i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied sciences Vol. 12; no. 24; p. 12969
Main Authors Ibsen, Mathias, Rathgeb, Christian, Drozdowski, Pawel, Busch, Christoph
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2022
Subjects
Algorithms
Automation
Biometric identification
Biometrics
Deep learning
Face recognition
Facial recognition technology
facial tattoos
Image quality
Pattern recognition
Plastic surgery
Synthetic data
synthetic data generation
Systems analysis
tattoo removal
Tattoos
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Summary:Systems that analyse faces have seen significant improvements in recent years and are today used in numerous application scenarios. However, these systems have been found to be negatively affected by facial alterations such as tattoos. To better understand and mitigate the effect of facial tattoos in facial analysis systems, large datasets of images of individuals with and without tattoos are needed. To this end, we propose a generator for automatically adding realistic tattoos to facial images. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of the generation by using a deep learning-based model for removing tattoos from face images. The experimental results show that it is possible to remove facial tattoos from real images without degrading the quality of the image. Additionally, we show that it is possible to improve face recognition accuracy by using the proposed deep learning-based tattoo removal before extracting and comparing facial features.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app122412969