FAAD: face at a distance
Terrance E. Boult, Walter J. Scheirer, Robert Sessions Woodworth · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
The issues of applying facial recognition at significant distances are non-trivial and often subtle. This paper summarizes 7 years of effort on Face at a distance, which for us is far more than a fad. Our effort started under the DARPA Human Identification at a Distance (HID) program. Of all the programmers under HID, only a few of the efforts demonstrated face recognition at greater than 25ft and only one, lead by Dr. Boult, studied face recognition at distances greater than 50 meters. Two issues were explicitly studied. The first was atmospherics/weather, which can have a measurable impact at these distances. The second area was sensor issues including resolution, field-of-view and dynamic range. This paper starts with a discussion and some of results in sensors related issues including resolution, FOV, dynamic range and lighting normalization. It then discusses the "Photohead" technique developed to analyze the impact of weather/imaging and atmospherics at medium distances. The paper presents experimental results showing the limitations of existing systems at significant distance and under non-ideal weather conditions and presents some reasons for the weak performance. It ends with a discussion of our FASSTTM (failure prediction from similarity surface theory) and RandomEyesTM approaches, combined into the FIINDERTM system and how they improved FAAD.