Model Compression Techniques in Biometrics Applications: A Survey

Official repository for the paper "Model Compression Techniques in Biometrics Applications: A Survey".

Abstract

The development of deep learning algorithms has extensively empowered humanity's task automatization capacity. However, the huge improvement in the performance of these models is highly correlated with their increasing level of complexity, limiting their usefulness in human-oriented applications, which are usually deployed in resource-constrained devices. This led to the development of compression techniques that drastically reduce the computational and memory costs of deep learning models without significant performance degradation. This paper aims to systematize the current literature on this topic by presenting a comprehensive survey of model compression techniques in biometrics applications, namely quantization, knowledge distillation and pruning. We conduct a critical analysis of the comparative value of these techniques, focusing on their advantages and disadvantages and presenting suggestions for future work directions that can potentially improve the current methods. Additionally, we discuss and analyze the link between model bias and model compression, highlighting the need to direct compression research toward model fairness in future works.

Quantization:

• Biometrics

  • Quantface: Towards lightweight face recognition by synthetic data low-bit quantization
  • Sub-byte quantization of mobile face recognition convolutional neural network
  • Lightweight periocular recognition through low-bit quantization
  • SyPer: Synthetic periocular data for quantized light-weight recognition in the NIR and visible domains
  • How Colorful Should Faces Be? Harmonizing Color and Model Quantization for Resource-restricted Face Recognition

• Computer Vision

  • Incremental network quantization: Towards lossless cnns with lowprecision weights
  • Quantization and training of neural networks for efficient integer arithmetic-only inference
  • Lqnets: Learned quantization for highly accurate and compact deep neural networks
  • Mr.biq: Post-training non-uniform quantization based on minimizing the reconstruction error
  • Learnable lookup table for neural network quantization
  • A neural network compression method based on knowledge-distillation and parameter quantization for the bearing fault diagnosis
  • Towards Feature Distribution Alignment and Diversity Enhancement for Data-Free Quantization
  • Long-Range Zero-Shot Generative Deep Network Quantization

Knowledge Distillation

• Biometrics
  • Face model compression by distilling knowledge from neurons
  • Low-resolution face recognition in the wild via selective knowledge distillation
  • Shrinkteanet: Million-scale lightweight face recognition via shrinking teacher student networks
  • Compact models for periocular verification through knowledge distillation
  • Learning an evolutionary embedding via massive knowledge distillation
  • Efficient low-resolution face recognition via bridge distillation
  • Teacher guided neural architecture search for face recognition
  • Mask-invariant face recognition through template-level knowledge distillation
  • Pocketnet: Extreme lightweight face recognition network using neural architecture search and multistep knowledge distillation
  • Evaluation-oriented knowledge distillation for deep face recognition
  • Template-driven knowledge distillation for compact and accurate periocular biometrics deep-learning models
  • Coupleface: Relation matters for face recognition distillation
  • Low-resolution iris recognition via knowledge transfer
  • Rethinking feature-based knowledge distillation for face recognition
  • Grouped knowledge distillation for deep face recognition
  • Probabilistic knowledge distillation of face ensembles
  • Privileged knowledge distillation for dimensional emotion recognition in the wild
  • Unveiling the two-faced truth: Disentangling morphed identities for face morphing detection
  • AdaDistill: Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Deep Face Recognition

Pruning

• Biometrics

  • Channel-level acceleration of deep face representations
  • Graph-based dynamic ensemble pruning for facial expression recognition
  • Discrimination-aware network pruning for deep model compression
  • Squeezerfacenet: Reducing a small face recognition cnn even more via filter pruning
  • Ipad: Iterative pruning with activation deviation for sclera biometrics

• Computer Vision

  • Pruning filters for efficient convnets
  • To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression
  • The lottery ticket hypothesis: Finding sparse, trainable neural networks
  • Nisp: Pruning networks using neuron importance score propagation
  • Snip: Single-shot network pruning based on connection sensitivity

Compression-induced Bias

• Biometrics
  • The effect of model compression on fairness in facial expression recognition
  • Compressed models decompress race biases: What quantized models forget for fair face recognition
  • Rectifying the Data Bias in Knowledge Distillation
  • Simon says: Evaluating and mitigating bias in pruned neural networks with knowledge distillation
  • Prune responsibly
  • Bias in Pruned Vision Models: In-Depth Analysis and Countermeasures
  • Fairgrape: Fairnessaware gradient pruning method for face attribute classification

Citation

If you use our work in your research, please cite with:

@article{DBLP:journals/inffus/CaldeiraNHDS25,
  author       = {Eduarda Caldeira and
                  Pedro C. Neto and
                  Marco Huber and
                  Naser Damer and
                  Ana Filipa Sequeira},
  title        = {Model compression techniques in biometrics applications: {A} survey},
  journal      = {Inf. Fusion},
  volume       = {114},
  pages        = {102657},
  year         = {2025}
}