# How Unique Is a Face: An Investigative Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04965/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [The Devil of Face Recognition is in the Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11649/) (2018)
- [Some Research Problems in Biometrics: The Future Beckons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04717/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Empirical Assessment of End-to-End Iris Recognition System Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12742/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face recognition has been widely accepted as a means of identification in applications ranging from border control to security in the banking sector. Surprisingly, while widely accepted, we still lack the understanding of uniqueness or distinctiveness of faces as biometric modality. In this work, we study the impact of factors such as image resolution, feature representation, database size, age and gender on uniqueness denoted by the Kullback-Leibler divergence between genuine and impostor distributions. Towards understanding the impact, we present experimental results on the datasets AT&T, LFW, IMDb-Face, as well as ND-TWINS, with the feature extraction algorithms VGGFace, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNet and DenseNet121, that reveal the quantitative impact of the named factors. While these are early results, our findings indicate the need for a better understanding of the concept of biometric uniqueness and its implication on face recognition.