A Comparison of Human and Automated Face Verification Accuracy on Unconstrained Image Sets

Automatic face recognition technologies have seen significant improvements in performance due to a combination of advances in deep learning and availability of larger datasets for training deep networks. Since recognizing faces is a task that humans are believed to be very good at, it is only natural to compare the relative performance of automated face recognition and humans when processing fully unconstrained facial imagery. In this work, we expand on previous studies of the recognition accuracy of humans and automated systems by performing several novel analyses utilizing unconstrained face imagery. We examine the impact on performance when human recognizers are presented with varying amounts of imagery per subject, immutable attributes such as gender, and circumstantial attributes such as occlusion, illumination, and pose. Results indicate that humans greatly outperform state of the art automated face recognition algorithms on the challenging IJB-A dataset.