Recognizing Disguised Faces in the Wild

Research in face recognition has seen tremendous growth over the past couple of decades. Beginning from algorithms capable of performing recognition in constrained environments, existing face recognition systems achieve very high accuracies on large-scale unconstrained face datasets. While upcoming algorithms continue to achieve improved performance, many of them are susceptible to reduced performance under disguise variations, one of the most challenging covariate of face recognition. In this paper, the disguised faces in the wild (DFW) dataset is presented, which contains over 11000 images of 1000 identities with variations across different types of disguise accessories (the DFW dataset link: http://iab-rubric.org/resources/dfw.html). The images are collected from the Internet, resulting in unconstrained variations similar to real-world settings. This is a unique dataset that contains impersonator and genuine obfuscated face images for each subject. The DFW dataset has been analyzed in terms of three levels of difficulty: 1) easy; 2) medium; and 3) hard, in order to showcase the challenging nature of the problem. The dataset was released as part of the First International Workshop and Competition on DFW at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2018. This paper presents the DFW dataset in detail, including the evaluation protocols, baseline results, performance analysis of the submissions received as part of the competition, and three levels of difficulties of the DFW challenge dataset.