<p>Transfer learning for facial detection would be a great way to go ahead. Also, yes transfer learning with facenet is a great idea. </p>

<p>Also, for transfer learning to work it is not necessary that the model had to be initially pre-trained with only faces like using facenet. A model pre-trained with imagenet would also be pretty darn good! This is a very hot topic, so do not try to reinvent the wheel. There are many repositories that have already done this using transfer learning from imagenet dataset and using resnet50 with astonishingly good results. </p>

<p>Here is a link to one such repository:</p>

<p><a href="https://github.com/loheden/face_recognition_with_siamese_network" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/loheden/face_recognition_with_siamese_network</a></p>

<p>Also note that siamese networks is a technique that is especially good in the facial recognition use case. The concept of siamese is really simple: take two images and compare the features of these two images. If the similarity in features are above a set threshold, then the two images are the same (the two faces are the same) else not the same (face not recognized). </p>

<p>Here is a research paper on <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832" rel="nofollow noreferrer">siamese networks for facial recognition</a>.</p>

<p>Also, here is a two-part tutorial on how to implement the siamese network for facial recognition using transfer learning:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.loheden.com/2018/07/face-recognition-with-siamese-network.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.loheden.com/2018/07/face-recognition-with-siamese-network.html</a></p>

<p><a href="http://www.loheden.com/2018/07/face-recognition-with-siamese-network_29.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.loheden.com/2018/07/face-recognition-with-siamese-network_29.html</a></p>

<p>The above tutorial's code is in the first Github link I shared at the beginning of this answer.</p>
Transfer learning for facial identification using classifiers
<p>I wish to know whether I can use an Inception or ResNet model to identify faces. I want to know whether transfer learning and training is even considerable for my task. </p>

<p>I just want to be able to identify faces but I am also curious whether I can retrain/optimize a pre-trained model for my task.</p>

<p>Or have I been reading of things wrong; do I need to get a pre-trained model that was designed for faces?</p>

<p>I have tried poking around with Inception and VGG16 but I have not trained them for faces. I am working on it but I want to know whether this is even viable or simply a waste of time. If I use transfer learning with FaceNet I think I'll be better off.</p>