We document methods for the quantitative evaluation of systems that produce a scalar summary of a biometric sample's quality. We are motivated by a need to test claims that quality measures are predictive of matching performance. We regard a quality measurement algorithm as a black box that converts an input sample to an output scalar. We evaluate it by quantifying the association between those values and observed matching results. We advance detection error trade-off and error versus reject characteristics as metrics for the comparative evaluation of sample quality measurement algorithms. We proceed this with a definition of sample quality, a description of the operational use of quality measures. We emphasize the performance goal by including a procedure for annotating the samples of a reference corpus with quality values derived from empirical recognition scores.

The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002 is an independently administered technology evaluation of mature face recognition systems. FRVT 2002 provides performance measures for assessing the capability of face recognition systems to meet requirements for large-scale, real-world applications. Ten commercial firms participated in FRVT 2002. FRVT 2002 computed performance statistics on an extremely large data set-121,589 operational facial images of 37,437 individuals. FRVT 2002 1) characterized identification and watch list performance as a function of database size, 2) estimated the variability in performance for different groups of people, 3) characterized performance as a function of elapsed time between enrolled and new images of a person, and 4) investigated the effect of demographics on performance. FRVT 2002 shows that recognition from indoor images has made substantial progress since FRVT 2000. Demographic results show that males are easier to recognize than females and that older people are easier to recognize than younger people. FRVT 2002 also assessed the impact of three new techniques for improving face recognition: three-dimensional morphable models, normalization of similarity scores, and face recognition from video sequences. Results show that three-dimensional morphable models and normalization increase performance and that face recognition from video sequences offers only a limited increase in performance over still images. A new XML-based evaluation protocol was developed for FRVT 2002. This protocol is flexible and supports evaluations of biometrics in general.

The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)

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