# A Unified Framework for Masked and Mask-Free Face Recognition via Feature Rectification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Learning Face Representation from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7923/) (2014)
- [The MegaFace Benchmark: 1 Million Faces for Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00596/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning Face Representation by Joint Identification-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4773/) (2014)
- [Masked Face Recognition Dataset and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09093/) (2020)
- [Occlusion Robust Face Recognition Based on Mask Learning with PairwiseDifferential Siamese Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06290/) (2019)
- [Masked Face Recognition for Secure Authentication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11104/) (2020)
- [Robust LSTM-Autoencoders for Face De-Occlusion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08534/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12058/) (2023)
- [MoDE: Mixture of Diffusion Experts for Any Occluded Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04306/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face recognition under ideal conditions is now considered a well-solved problem with advances in deep learning. Recognizing faces under occlusion, however, still remains a challenge. Existing techniques often fail to recognize faces with both the mouth and nose covered by a mask, which is now very common under the COVID-19 pandemic. Common approaches to tackle this problem include 1) discarding information from the masked regions during recognition and 2) restoring the masked regions before recognition. Very few works considered the consistency between features extracted from masked faces and from their mask-free counterparts. This resulted in models trained for recognizing masked faces often showing degraded performance on mask-free faces. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, named Face Feature Rectification Network (FFR-Net), for recognizing both masked and mask-free faces alike. We introduce rectification blocks to rectify features extracted by a state-of-the-art recognition model, in both spatial and channel dimensions, to minimize the distance between a masked face and its mask-free counterpart in the rectified feature space. Experiments show that our unified framework can learn a rectified feature space for recognizing both masked and mask-free faces effectively, achieving state-of-the-art results. Project code: https://github.com/haoosz/FFR-Net