ITL’s Information Access Division (IAD) released a report on
results of the recent Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002. This evaluation was performed by NIST,
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Defense
Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office, and NAVSEA Crane
Division. FRVT 2002 evaluated
commercially available and mature prototypes of automatic face recognition
systems. This was the largest scale
“face-off” of facial recognition systems ever performed, measuring face recognition performance of 10
vendors on a Department of State database of 121,000 images of 37,000
individuals. FRVT 2002 characterized
verification, identification and watch list performance as a function of
database size, characterized the variability in performance for different
groups of people, characterized performance as a function of elapsed time
between enrolled and new images of a person, and investigated the effect of
demographics on performance. For FRVT
2002, IAD developed a new XML-based evaluation protocol designed to be flexible
enough to be used in evaluating other types of biometrics as well.
Test results showed
that for recognition of images taken indoors, the best performing system had a
90% verification rate at a false accept rate of 1%. Results indicated that face recognition from indoor images has
made substantial progress in the past two years; compared with similar
experiments conducted in 2000, the results of FRVT 2002 indicate there was a
50% reduction in error rates.
Interesting demographic results show that males are easier to recognize
than females and that older people are easier to recognize than younger
people. FRVT 2002 also assessed the
impact of two techniques for improving face recognition: three-dimensional morphable models, and face
recognition from video sequences.
Results show that 3-D morphable models increase performance, and that
face recognition from video sequences offers only a limited increase in
performance over still images.
The results of these (and other biometric) tests are crucial to NIST’s mandate under the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and Enhanced Border Security Act to provide technical guidance for selection of biometric identification systems to be used at U.S. border entry-exit locations. Key results from FRVT 2002 were included in the recent report to Congress, also mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act. The complete FRVT 2002 report is available at www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.03/face/face.html#FRVT2002 and at www.frvt.org.