# Open-Set Biometrics: Beyond Good Closed-Set Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16133/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00964/) (2022)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [MagFace: A Universal Representation for Face Recognition and Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06627/) (2021)
- [CurricularFace: Adaptive Curriculum Learning Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00288/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08581/) (2018)
- [OpenOOD: Benchmarking Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07242/) (2022)
- [WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04098/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Reciprocal Points Learning for Open Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00953/) (2021)
- [Classification-Reconstruction Learning for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04246/) (2018)
- [GaitSet: Regarding Gait as a Set for Cross-View Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06186/) (2018)
- [OpenGAN: Open-Set Recognition via Open Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02939/) (2021)
- [Gait Recognition via Effective Global-Local Feature Representation and Local Temporal Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01461/) (2020)
- [Learning Placeholders for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15086/) (2021)
- [Gait Recognition in the Wild with Dense 3D Representations and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02569/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Models for Open Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12506/) (2020)
- [Clothes-Changing Person Re-identification with RGB Modality Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06890/) (2022)
- [OpenGait: Revisiting Gait Recognition Toward Better Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06597/) (2022)
- [Gait Recognition via Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04925/) (2019)
- [Body Part-Based Representation Learning for Occluded Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03679/) (2022)
- [LidarGait: Benchmarking 3D Gait Recognition with Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10598/) (2022)
- [Temporal Complementary Learning for Video Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09357/) (2020)
- [GaitEdge: Beyond Plain End-to-end Gait Recognition for Better Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03972/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BiggerGait: Unlocking Gait Recognition with Layer-wise Representations from Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18132/) (2025)
- [50 Years of Automated Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24247/) (2025)
- [SapiensID: Foundation for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04708/) (2025)
- [Person Recognition at Altitude and Range: Fusion of Face, Body Shape and Gait](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04616/) (2025)
- [A Quality-Guided Mixture of Score-Fusion Experts Framework for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00053/) (2025)
- [HAMoBE: Hierarchical and Adaptive Mixture of Biometric Experts for Video-based Person ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05038/) (2025)
- [LocalScore: Local Density-Aware Similarity Scoring for Biometrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01012/) (2026)
- [FusionAgent: A Multimodal Agent with Dynamic Model Selection for Human Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26908/) (2026)
- [Silhouette-based Gait Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00691/) (2025)
- [IDSelect: A RL-Based Cost-Aware Selection Agent for Video-based Multi-Modal Person Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18990/) (2026)
- [Subject-Level Unknown-Identity Identification from Leap Motion Controller 2 Hand Landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22986/) (2026)
- [Subtoken Vision Transformer for Fine-grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09086/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Biometric recognition has primarily addressed closed-set identification, assuming all probe subjects are in the gallery. However, most practical applications involve open-set biometrics, where probe subjects may or may not be present in the gallery. This poses distinct challenges in effectively distinguishing individuals in the gallery while minimizing false detections. While it is commonly believed that powerful biometric models can excel in both closed- and open-set scenarios, existing loss functions are inconsistent with open-set evaluation. They treat genuine (mated) and imposter (non-mated) similarity scores symmetrically and neglect the relative magnitudes of imposter scores. To address these issues, we simulate open-set evaluation using minibatches during training and introduce novel loss functions: (1) the identification-detection loss optimized for open-set performance under selective thresholds and (2) relative threshold minimization to reduce the maximum negative score for each probe. Across diverse biometric tasks, including face recognition, gait recognition, and person re-identification, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed loss functions, significantly enhancing open-set performance while positively impacting closed-set performance. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/prevso1088/open-set-biometrics.
