Surveillance Face Recognition Challenge

Face recognition (FR) is one of the most extensively investigated problems in computer vision. Significant progress in FR has been made due to the recent introduction of the larger scale FR challenges, particularly with constrained social media web images, e.g. high-resolution photos of celebrity faces taken by professional photo-journalists. However, the more challenging FR in unconstrained and low-resolution surveillance images remains largely under-studied. To facilitate more studies on developing FR models that are effective and robust for low-resolution surveillance facial images, we introduce a new Surveillance Face Recognition Challenge, which we call the QMUL-SurvFace benchmark. This new benchmark is the largest and more importantly the only true surveillance FR benchmark to our best knowledge, where low-resolution images are not synthesised by artificial down-sampling of native high-resolution images. This challenge contains 463,507 face images of 15,573 distinct identities captured in real-world uncooperative surveillance scenes over wide space and time. As a consequence, it presents an extremely challenging FR benchmark. We benchmark the FR performance on this challenge using five representative deep learning face recognition models, in comparison to existing benchmarks. We show that the current state of the arts are still far from being satisfactory to tackle the under-investigated surveillance FR problem in practical forensic scenarios. Face recognition is generally more difficult in an open-set setting which is typical for surveillance scenarios, owing to a large number of non-target people (distractors) appearing open spaced scenes. This is evidently so that on the new Surveillance FR Challenge, the top-performing CentreFace deep learning FR model on the MegaFace benchmark can now only achieve 13.2% success rate (at Rank-20) at a 10% false alarm rate.