Evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms for remote face recognition

In this paper, we describe a remote face database which has been acquired in an unconstrained outdoor environment. The face images in this database suffer from variations due to blur, poor illumination, pose, and occlusion. It is well known that many state-of-the-art still image-based face recognition algorithms work well, when constrained (frontal, well illuminated, high-resolution, sharp, and complete) face images are presented. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of a subset of existing still image-based face recognition algorithms for the remote face data set. We demonstrate that in addition to applying a good classification algorithm, consistent detection of faces with fewer false alarms and finding features that are robust to variations mentioned above are very important for remote face recognition. Also setting up a comprehensive metric to evaluate the quality of face images is necessary in order to reject images that are of low quality.