Old men easier for Face Recog Tech: DARPA/NIST study

[Major Variola (ret)]

DARPA/NIST's most recent signal detection studies now online.  They even

mention "watch list tasks".

Abstract
The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002 is an independently
administered
technology evaluation of mature face recognition systems. FRVT 2002
provides
performance measures for assessing the capability of face recognition
systems to meet
requirements for large-scale real world applications. Ten commercial
firms participated
in FRVT 2002. FRVT 2002 computed performance statistics on an extremely
large
dataset121,589 operational facial images of 37,437 individuals. FRVT
2002 1)
characterized identification and watch list performance as a function of
database size, 2)
estimated the variability in performance for different groups of people,
3) characterized
performance as a function of elapsed time between enrolled and new
images of a person
and 4) investigated the effect of demographics on performance. FRVT 2002
shows that
recognition from indoor images has made substantial progress since FRVT
2000.
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
three-dimensional
morphable models increases performance, and that face recognition from
video
sequences offers only a limited increase in performance over still
images. For FRVT
2002, a new XML-based evaluation protocol was developed. This protocol
is flexible and
supports evaluations of biometrics in general.
http://frvt.org/DLs/FRVT_2002_Overview_and_Summary.pdf