mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MLFW: A Database for Face Recognition on Masked Faces

arXiv 2109.05804 ↗First posted 13 Sep 2021cs.CVcited by 10

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Abstract (arXiv)

As more and more people begin to wear masks due to current COVID-19 pandemic, existing face recognition systems may encounter severe performance degradation when recognizing masked faces. To figure out the impact of masks on face recognition model, we build a simple but effective tool to generate masked faces from unmasked faces automatically, and construct a new database called Masked LFW (MLFW) based on Cross-Age LFW (CALFW) database. The mask on the masked face generated by our method has good visual consistency with the original face. Moreover, we collect various mask templates, covering most of the common styles appeared in the daily life, to achieve diverse generation effects. Considering realistic scenarios, we design three kinds of combinations of face pairs. The recognition accuracy of SOTA models declines 5%-16% on MLFW database compared with the accuracy on the original images. MLFW database can be viewed and downloaded at urlhttp://whdeng.cn/mlfw.

Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

Builds on

15 of 20 references.

References · 15

  1. 2017VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and agecited by 911
  2. 2016MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognitioncited by 621
  3. 2017How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)cited by 524
  4. 2014Learning Face Representation from Scratchcited by 451
  5. 2020CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognitioncited by 320
  6. 2017Cross-Age LFW: A Database for Studying Cross-Age Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environmentscited by 258
  7. 2020Towards Transferable Adversarial Attack against Deep Face Recognitioncited by 79
  8. 2020Masked Face Recognition Dataset and Applicationcited by 66
  9. 2020Masked Face Recognition for Secure Authenticationcited by 47
  10. 2021Masked Face Recognition Challenge: The InsightFace Track Reportcited by 41
  11. 2020MaskedFace-Net -- A Dataset of Correctly/Incorrectly Masked Face Images in the Context of COVID-19cited by 31
  12. 2021Face.evoLVe: A High-Performance Face Recognition Librarycited by 26
3 more
  1. 2021MFR 2021: Masked Face Recognition Competitioncited by 23
  2. 2021Masked Face Recognition Challenge: The WebFace260M Track Reportcited by 12
  3. 2021Towards NIR-VIS Masked Face Recognitioncited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 2; 2023: 3; 2024: 2; 2025: 2.

10 papers.

  1. 2021DeepFace-EMD: Re-ranking Using Patch-wise Earth Mover's Distance Improves Out-Of-Distribution Face Identificationcited by 20
  2. 2025Face-Human-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Face and Human Understanding for Multi-modal Assistantscited by 12
  3. 2023Fast and Interpretable Face Identification for Out-Of-Distribution Data Using Vision Transformerscited by 4
  4. 2022A Survey on Computer Vision based Human Analysis in the COVID-19 Eracited by 3
  5. 2024Identity Overlap Between Face Recognition Train/Test Data: Causing Optimistic Bias in Accuracy Measurementcited by 3
  6. 2024Goldilocks Test Sets for Face Verificationcited by 3
  7. 2022Ensemble Learning using Transformers and Convolutional Networks for Masked Face Recognitioncited by 1
  8. 2023Tackling Face Verification Edge Cases: In-Depth Analysis and Human-Machine Fusion Approachcited by 1
  9. 2023Seeing through the Mask: Multi-task Generative Mask Decoupling Face Recognitioncited by 0
  10. 2025Two-Step Data Augmentation for Masked Face Detection and Recognition: Turning Fake Masks to Realcited by 0