Face recognition for look-alikes: A preliminary study

One of the major challenges of face recognition is to design a feature extractor and matcher that reduces the intraclass variations and increases the inter-class variations. The feature extraction algorithm has to be robust enough to extract similar features for a particular subject despite variations in quality, pose, illumination, expression, aging, and disguise. The problem is exacerbated when there are two individuals with lower inter-class variations, i.e., look-alikes. In such cases, the intra-class similarity is higher than the inter-class variation for these two individuals. This research explores the problem of look-alike faces and their effect on human performance and automatic face recognition algorithms. There is three fold contribution in this research: firstly, we analyze the human recognition capabilities for look-alike appearances. Secondly, we compare human recognition performance with ten existing face recognition algorithms, and finally, proposed an algorithm to improve the face verification accuracy. The analysis shows that neither humans nor automatic face recognition algorithms are efficient in recognizing look-alikes.