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GCN Home > 04/03/07 web stories

That face! Those eyes! How recognizable?

Technology for computerized facial recognition is improving, according to a recent NIST report.

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Technology for computerized facial recognition is ten times more accurate now than it was four years ago, and the best of the systems outperform humans, the National Institute of Standards said.

The federal government has pressed the private sector to improve facial and iris recognition technology dramatically so as to pave the way for improved biometric systems, and NIST has overseen the process in tests called the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006.

The facial-recognition test has compared vendor systems on in their ability to recognize high-resolution still images and three-dimensional facial images, under both controlled and uncontrolled illumination. The ICE 2006 test reported iris recognition performance from left and right irises. The study compared the facial recognition test results with an earlier evaluation called the FRVT 2002. ICE 2006 reported iris recognition performance from left and right irises.

According to a NIST report issued in late March, the facial recognition systems it tested in the FRVT 2006 trials showed an “order of magnitude,” or tenfold, improvement over comparable tests conducted four years ago.

The NIST study found that under the tests’ conditions, the algorithms’ recognition performance was about the same for very-high resolution still face images, 3-Dthree-dimensional face images and single-iris images.

The dramatic performance improvement was one of the goals of the government’s Face Recognition Grand Challenge. “In an experiment comparing human and algorithm [system] performance, the best-performing face recognition algorithms were more accurate than humans,” NIST reported.

Eight authors, including specialists from NIST, Science Applications International Corp, Schafer Corp., Notre Dame University and the Universityuniversities of Notre Dame and Texas worked together on the final research paper, titled "FRVT 2006 and ICE 2006 Large Scale Results."

In general, state-of-the-art facial recognition systems have reduced their error rates from about 0.73 percent in a 1993 evaluation that was partially automated to 0.01 in the fully automated FRVT 2006, the report said.

More news on related topics: Biometrics



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