Generative Adversarial Lightweight Classroom Face Recognition and Hierarchical Reshaping Optimization Model

Digital Technologies Research and Applications

Article

Generative Adversarial Lightweight Classroom Face Recognition and Hierarchical Reshaping Optimization Model

Yang, X., & Raga Jr., R. C. (2026). Generative Adversarial Lightweight Classroom Face Recognition and Hierarchical Reshaping Optimization Model. Digital Technologies Research and Applications, 5(1), 118–133. https://doi.org/10.54963/dtra.v5i1.1793

Authors

  • Xuliang Yang

    University and Urban Integration Development Research Center, Dongguan City University, Dongguan 523000, China
    College of Computing & Information Technologies, National University, Manila 0900, Philippines
  • Rodolfo C. Raga Jr.

    College of Computer Studies and Engineering, Jose Rizal University, Mandaluyong 0900, Philippines

Received: 30 October 2025; Revised: 10 December 2025; Accepted: 27 January 2026; Published: 10 February 2026

To address the significant decline in face recognition performance caused by low resolution, high noise, and complex degradation factors in security surveillance scenarios, this paper proposes a joint optimization framework that integrates a Transformer and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The innovation of this framework lies in: (1) designing the Face Reconstruction Transformer (FRFormer), which integrates a hierarchical window attention mechanism and a multi-level feature pyramid structure, enhancing the ability to retain identity features through local-global collaborative modeling; (2) constructing the GFP-GAN reconstruction model, which combines pre-trained face priors and degradation removal modules, and utilizes adversarial training to improve image authenticity and detail restoration. Experiments show that when the input is 32 × 32 pixels, the PSNR of GFP-GAN is increased by more than 8 dB, and the SSIM reaches 0.953; FRFormer achieves recognition accuracies of 99.58% and 96.31% on the LFW and AgeDB-30 benchmarks, respectively, which are 0.08 and 0.13 percentage points higher than those of Swin Transformer. Ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of the window attention mechanism and hierarchical reconstruction strategy, especially in noise suppression and cross-pose recognition tasks. This framework has broad application potential in degraded visual conditions, such as biometric recognition and medical image analysis, and provides an end-to-end solution for low-quality face recognition.

Keywords:

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Transformer Architecture Face Reconstruction Window Attention Mechanism

References

  1. Wang, X.; Li, Y.; Zhang, H.; et al. Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior. In Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Nashville, TN, USA, 20–25 June 2021; pp. 9164–9174. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.00905
  2. Deng, J.; Guo, J.; Xue, N.; et al. ArcFace: Additive Angular Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Long Beach, CA, USA, 15–20 June 2019; pp. 4685–4694. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2019.00482
  3. Ning, X.; Jiang, L.; Li, W.; et al. Swin-MGNet: Swin Transformer Based Multiview Grouping Network for 3-D Object Recognition. IEEE Trans. Artif. Intell. 2025, 6, 747–758. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TAI.2024.3492163
  4. Hu, S.; Huang, S.; Wang, J. Hybrid Feature Enhancement Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution. Vis. Comput. 2025, 41, 8715–8727. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-025-03894-w
  5. Fan, Y.; Wang, Y.; Liang, D.; et al. Low-FaceNet: Face Recognition-Driven Low-Light Image Enhancement. IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas. 2024, 73, 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2024.3372230
  6. Ledig, C.; Theis, L.; Huszár, F.; et al. Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 4681–4690. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2017.19
  7. Gu, Y.; Wang, X.; Xie, L.; et al. VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder. In Computer Vision – ECCV 2022; Avidan, S., Brostow, G., Cissé, M., et al., Eds.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2022; 13678, pp. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19797-0_8
  8. Chen, C.; Li, X.; Yang, L.; et al. Progressive Semantic-Aware Style Transformation for Blind Face Restoration. In Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Nashville, TN, USA, 20–25 June 2021; pp. 11891–11900. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR46437.2021.01172
  9. Yang, L.; Liu, C.; Wang, P.; et al. HiFaceGAN: Face Renovation via Collaborative Suppression and Replenishment. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Seattle, WA, USA, 12–16 October 2020; pp. 1551–1560. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3394171.3413965
  10. Dan, J.; Liu, Y.; Xie, H.; et al. TransFace: Calibrating Transformer Training for Face Recognition from a Data-Centric Perspective. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, Paris, France, 1–6 October 2023; pp. 20585–20596. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV51070.2023.01887
  11. Zamir, S.; Arora, A.; Khan, S.; et al. Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, New Orleans, LA, USA, 18–24 June 2022; pp. 5728–5739. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00564
  12. Chen, L.; Chu, X.; Zhang, X.; et al. Simple Baselines for Image Restoration. In Computer Vision – ECCV 2022; Avidan, S., Brostow, G., Cissé, M., et al., Eds.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2022; 13667, pp. 203–219. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20071-7_2
  13. Deng, P.; Ge, C.; Wei, H.; et al. Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Face Anti-Spoofing. Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell. 2024, 129, 107600. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2023.107600
  14. Gu, C.; Gromov, M. Unpaired Image-To-Image Translation Using Transformer-Based CycleGAN. In Tools and Methods of Program Analysis; Yavorskiy, R., Cavalli, A.R., Kalenkova, A., Eds.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2024; 1559, pp. 75–82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50423-5_7
  15. Gan, J.; Xiong, J. Masked Autoencoder of Multi-Scale Convolution Strategy Combined with Knowledge Distillation for Facial Beauty Prediction. Sci. Rep. 2025, 15, 2784. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86831-0
  16. Yan, L.; Yang, J.; Xia, J.; et al. Self-Supervised Extracted Contrast Network for Facial Expression Recognition. Multimed. Tools Appl. 2025, 84, 14977–14996. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-19556-3
  17. Keys, R. Cubic Convolution Interpolation for Digital Image Processing. IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. 1981, 29, 1153–1160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TASSP.1981.1163711
  18. Ahonen, T.; Hadid, A.; Pietikäinen, M. Face Description with Local Binary Patterns: Application to Face Recognition. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 2006, 28, 2037–2041. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2006.244
  19. Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I.; Seitz, S.M.; Miller, D.; et al. The MegaFace Benchmark: 1 Million Faces for Recognition at Scale. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 27–30 June 2016; pp. 4873–4882.
  20. Xin, Y.; Zhou, Y.; Jiang, J. RobustFace: Adaptive Mining of Noise and Hard Samples for Robust Face Recognitions. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Melbourne, Australia, 28 October–1 November 2024; pp. 5065–5073. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3664647.3681231
  21. Sengupta, S.; Chen, J.-C.; Castillo, C.; et al. Frontal to Profile Face Verification in the Wild. In Proceedings of the IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, Lake Placid, NY, USA, 7–10 March 2016; pp. 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV.2016.7477558
  22. Moschoglou, S.; Papaioannou, A.; Sagonas, C.; et al. AgeDB: The First Manually Collected, In-the-Wild Age Database. In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 1997–2005. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPRW.2017.250
  23. Wang, M.; Deng, W. Deep Face Recognition: A Survey. Neurocomputing 2021, 429, 215–244. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2020.10.081
  24. Lin, T.-Y.; Dollár, P.; Girshick, R.; et al. Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 936–944. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2017.106
  25. Deng, J.; Hu, J.; Zhang, N.; et al. Fine-Grained Face Verification: FGLFW Database, Baselines, and Human-DCMN Partnership. Pattern Recognit. 2017, 66, 63–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2016.11.023
  26. Schroff, F.; Kalenichenko, D.; Philbin, J. FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Boston, MA, USA, 7–12 June 2015; pp. 815–823. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2015.7298682
  27. Liu, W.; Wen, Y.; Yu, Z.; et al. SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 212–220.
  28. Xin, Y.; Zhong, X.; Zhou, Y.; et al. Robust Face Recognition via Adaptive Mining and Margining of Noise and Hard Samples. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2025, 34, 8114–8129. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2025.3634979
  29. Wang, H.; et al. CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 18–22 June 2018; pp. 5265–5274.
  30. Cao, Q.; Shen, L.; Xie, W.; et al. VGGFace2: A Dataset for Recognising Faces across Pose and Age. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Xi’an, China, 15–19 May 2018; pp. 67–74. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/FG.2018.00020
  31. Guo, Y.; Zhang, L.; Hu, Y.; et al. MS-Celeb-1M: Challenge of Recognizing One Million Celebrities in the Real World. In Proceedings of IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging, Science and Technology, San Francisco, CA, USA, 14–18 February 2016; pp. 1–6.
  32. Guo, Y.; Zhang, L.; Hu, Y.; et al. MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition. In Computer Vision – ECCV 2016; Leibe, B., Matas, J., Sebe, N., et al., Eds.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2016; 9907, pp. 87–102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46487-9_6