MGFace: Mask-Gated Face Matching via Conditional Similarity Routing
MGFace is a mask-gated face identification pipeline that predicts the mask status of a query face and conditionally routes similarity computation: global embedding matching for unmasked queries, and mask-aware patch-level re-ranking only for masked queries. On the extended LFW-Mask dataset, it achieves over 80% accuracy with FaceNet and over 90% with ArcFace, while reducing query time by approximately 20x compared to a prior EMD-based method.
-->
[Submitted on 14 Jul 2026]
Title:MGFace: Mask-Gated Face Matching via Conditional Similarity Routing
View a PDF of the paper titled MGFace: Mask-Gated Face Matching via Conditional Similarity Routing, by Huy Che and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Face identification has achieved remarkable performance under normal conditions. Yet, its accuracy often degrades significantly when query faces are partially occluded, especially by facial masks. Existing re-ranking approaches improve robustness by exploiting patch-level similarities. Still, they often rely on costly, fine-grained matching mechanisms, which limit their efficiency in large-scale retrieval scenarios. In this paper, we propose MGFace, a mask-gated face identification pipeline that predicts the mask status of a query face and conditionally routes the similarity computation accordingly. Specifically, MGFace distinguishes between masked and unmasked queries, applies global embedding matching to unmasked queries, and activates mask-aware patch-level re-ranking only for masked queries. This design focuses on reliable upper-face regions while avoiding unnecessary fine-grained computation. Experiments on the extended LFW-Mask dataset show that MGFace achieves over 80% identification accuracy with the FaceNet backbone and over 90% with the ArcFace backbone. Compared with a previous EMD-based re-ranking method, MGFace achieves better identification performance while reducing query time by approximately 20x. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of MGFace in improving masked-face identification accuracy with low computational overhead. The source code is available at this https URL.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.13187 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2607.13187v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.13187
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Quang Huy Che [view email] [v1] Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:39:18 UTC (734 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled MGFace: Mask-Gated Face Matching via Conditional Similarity Routing, by Huy Che and 3 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.CV
new | recent | 2026-07
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)