ShadowNets: Efficient and Accurate Face Recognition for Resource-Constrained Devices

Over recent years, deep convolutional neural networks have advanced the field of face recognition in both verification and identification applications. In this paper, we present ShadowNets, a highly efficient and compact face recognition network. We employed multiple shadow blocks in a cascading manner where the output of each shadow block is given as the input to the next shadow block. By integrating the advantages of Focal Modulation Blocks, Shadow Block and Ghost Modules, our proposed ShadowNets achieves superior face recognition performance, optimized specifically for edge devices. This network architecture not only minimizes computational costs and storage needs but also delivers high accuracy, making it suitable for deployment in edge environments. Our extensive experiments on challenging benchmark face datasets showcase the outstanding performance by achieving accuracy 98.85% on LFW, 84.37% on CFP-FP, and 91.23% on AgeDB-30 which validates the effectiveness of ShadowNets over state-of-the-art lightweight and deep face recognition models.