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Verification Technology Improves

NIST reports significant advances made in facial recognition technology.

Computers have become much more adept at "recognizing" human faces during the past two years, according a report released recently by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Scientists from NIST, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and Counter-Drug Technology Assessment Center (CTAC) have completed the most comprehensive evaluation to date of commercially available face recognition systems, and concluded that the technology made significant advances. The study, Face Recognition Vendor Test 2002 (FRVT 2002), was performed in response to the USA Patriot Act and the Enhanced Border Security Act.

The primary objective of FRVT 2002 was to provide performance measures for assessing the capability of automatic face recognition systems to meet real-world scenarios -- verification of identity, identification of an unknown individual and detection of an individual on a watch list.

Key findings of the study include new data about verification, demographics, and indoor and outdoor matching abilities.

The study shows a 50 percent reduction in error rates since comparable tests were conducted in 2000. For verification (i.e., determining whether a person is who he or she claims to be), the best facial recognition systems are equivalent to 1998 fingerprint matching technologies, yielding a 90 percent verification rate with a 1 percent false acceptance rate. This is a substantial improvement since the FRVT 2000, where the verification rate was 80 percent.

For the first time, researchers evaluated demographic factors impacting the ability to recognize faces. These results show males are easier to identify than females, and older people are easier to recognize than younger people.

The study also found significant differences in matching abilities depending on whether the images were taken indoors or outdoors. Face recognition performance for outdoor images is only about half as good as for indoor images, where there is better control of lighting conditions.

Ten companies participated in the tests, which involved matching 121,589 images of 37,437 individuals.