Face recognition

Over the last ten years or so, face recognition has become a popular area of research in computer vision and one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding. Because of the nature of the problem, not only computer science researchers are interested in it, but neuroscientists and psychologists also. It is the general opinion that advances in computer vision research will provide useful insights to neuroscientists and psychologists into how human brain works, and vice versa.

A general statement of the face recognition problem (in computer vision) can be formulated as follows: Given still or video images of a scene, identify or verify one or more persons in the scene using a stored database of faces.

Research directions (according to Face Recognition Vendor Test - FRVT 2002):

• Recognition from outdoor facial images.
• Recognition from non-frontal facial images.
• Recognition at low false accept/alarm rates.
• Understanding why males are easier to recognize than females.
• Greater understanding of the effects of demographic factors on performance.
• Development of better statistical methods for understanding performance.
• Develop improved models for predicting identification performance on very large galleries.
• Effect of algorithm and system training on covariate performance.
• Integration of morphable models into face recognition performance.
• Understanding the video sequences in FRVT 2002 did not improve performance.

Since the former Face Recognition Homepage of Peter Kruizinga is no longer active and we believe that face recognition is an important research area, we wanted to give prospective researchers a place to start on the Internet. Our Face Recognition Homepage aims to provide scientists with the relevant information in the area of face recognition. This page is intended to be an information pool for the face recognition community. Its goal is to provide an entry point for novices as well as a centralized information resource to concentrate face recognition and related scientific efforts.

The materials currently published on the web-site are what we believe every researcher in this area should read. Web-site is designed to be a portal, so you will notice numerous links to other research groups, links to relevant journals, books, databases etc. Another issue also worth mentioning is that this is a non-commercial, purely academic web-site.

On this Face Recognition Homepage you can find:

1. some general information about face recognition problems;
2. information about all changes on this Face Recognition Homepage;
3. links to research groups that work in the area of face recognition;
4. link to Face Recognition Research Community newsgroup (established in January 2007), where researchers can post questions and exchange ideas;
5. interesting papers that deal with the face recognition (general papers, standards, cognitive vision / psychology / neuroscience papers, highly cited papers, published items vs. citations);
6. new papers with most recent advances (the state-of-the-art) in face recognition;
7. face databases often used by researchers;
8. face recognition algorithms (image-based and video based) with a few most representative papers for each algorithm;
9. source codes contributed by users (Matlab, C/C++, Java);
10. list of conferences, where face recognition is the conference topic;
11. links to high impact factor journals which scope covers face recognition; information about some journal special issues; books on face recognition; other related books;
12. links to vendors developing face recognition technology;
13. other related links;
14. contact information.

Please feel free to inform all your colleagues who might be interested in this web-site. If you like the web-site yourself, please feel free to put a link to it on your web-page as well.

Hopefully, this effort will increase the number of researchers in this area and improve the state-of-the-art in face recognition. We believe that interdisciplinary approach will further improve the research, so by putting some psychology and cognitive science papers on the subject we would like to encourage that as well.

Besides, we would be most grateful if you could send us any comments, suggestions and corrections that could improve Face Recognition Homepage.

Mislav Grgic 
Kresimir Delac