Face recognition using popular deep net architectures: A brief comparative study

In the realm of computer security, the username/password standard is becoming increas-ingly antiquated. Usage of the same username and password across various accounts can leave a user open to potential vulnerabilities. Authentication methods of the future need to maintain the ability to provide secure access without a reduction in speed. Facial recognition technologies are quickly becoming integral parts of user security, allowing for a secondary level of user authentica-tion. Augmenting traditional username and password security with facial biometrics has already seen impressive results; however, studying these techniques is necessary to determine how effective these methods are within various parameters. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a power-ful classification approach which is often used for image identification and verification. Quite re-cently, CNNs have shown great promise in the area of facial image recognition. The comparative study proposed in this paper offers an in-depth analysis of several state-of-the-art deep learning based-facial recognition technologies, to determine via accuracy and other metrics which of those are most effective. In our study, VGG-16 and VGG-19 showed the highest levels of image recognition accuracy, as well as F1-Score. The most favorable configurations of CNN should be docu-mented as an effective way to potentially augment the current username/password standard by increasing the current method’s security with additional facial biometrics.