Attention-Mechanism-Based Face Feature Extraction Model for WeChat Applet on Mobile Devices

Face recognition technology has been widely used with the WeChat applet on mobile devices; however, facial images are captured on mobile devices and then transmitted to a server for feature extraction and recognition in most existing systems. There are significant security risks related to personal information leakage with these transmissions. Therefore, we propose a face recognition framework for the WeChat applet in which face features are extracted in WeChat by the proposed Face Feature Extraction Model based on Attention Mechanism (FFEM-AM), and only the extracted features are transmitted to the server for recognition. In order to balance the prediction accuracy and model complexity, the structure of the proposed FFEM-AM is lightweight, and Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) was introduced to improve the prediction accuracy. The proposed FFEM-AM was evaluated using a self-built database and the WeChat applet on mobile devices. The experiments show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed FFEM-AM was 98.1%, the running time was less than 100 ms, and the memory cost was only 6.5 MB. Therefore, this demonstrates that the proposed FFEM-AM has high prediction accuracy and can also be deployed with the WeChat applet.