Fast face sequence matching in large-scale video databases

There have recently been many methods proposed for matching face sequences in the field of face retrieval. However, most of them have proven to be inefficient in large-scale video databases because they frequently require a huge amount of computational cost to obtain a high degree of accuracy. We present an efficient matching method that is based on the face sequences (called face tracks) in large-scale video databases. The key idea is how to capture the distribution of a face track in the fewest number of low-computational steps. In order to do that, each face track is represented by a vector that approximates the first principal component of the face track distribution and the similarity of face tracks bases on the similarity of these vectors. Our experimental results from a large-scale database of 457,320 human faces extracted from 370 hours of TRECVID videos from 2004–2006 show that the proposed method easily handles the scalability by maintaining a good balance between the speed and the accuracy.