Design and Performance Evaluation of a Lightweight Face Recognition Model for Android Devices

Mention Face recognition systems have become increasingly important in mobile authentication, attendance monitoring, and smart surveillance applications. However, deploying deep learning–based face recognition models on mobile devices remains challenging due to limited computational resources, memory constraints, and power consumption. This research proposes a lightweight and efficient face recognition framework optimized specifically for Android-based mobile devices. The proposed system utilizes a MobileNetV2-based convolutional neural network architecture to extract discriminative facial embeddings, followed by cosine similarity for identity matching. To ensure mobile compatibility, the trained model is converted and optimized using TensorFlow Lite with post-training quantization techniques, significantly reducing model size and inference latency while maintaining high recognition accuracy. Experimental evaluation was conducted using the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. The optimized lightweight model achieved competitive accuracy while reducing model size by over 70% and decreasing inference time by more than 60% compared to a standard CNN-based implementation. Real-time testing on Android devices demonstrated efficient on-device processing with low memory usage and minimal battery impact. The results indicate that lightweight deep learning architectures combined with model optimization techniques can enable accurate and real-time face recognition on resource-constrained mobile platforms. The proposed framework provides a practical and scalable solution for deploying secure biometric authentication systems on modern smartphones.