Face Verification With Challenging Imposters and Diversified Demographics

Adrian Popescu, Liviu-Daniel Ștefan, Jérôme Deshayes-Chossart, Bogdan Ionescu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022, pp. 3357-3366

Face verification aims to distinguish between genuine and imposter pairs of faces, which include the same or different identities, respectively. The performance reported in recent years gives the impression that the task is practically solved. Here, we revisit the problem and argue that existing evaluation datasets were built using two oversimplifying design choices. First, the usual identity selection to form imposter pairs is not challenging enough because, in practice, verification is needed to detect challenging imposters. Second, the underlying demographics of existing datasets are often insufficient to account for the wide diversity of facial characteristics of people from across the world. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce the FaVCI2D dataset. Imposter pairs are challenging because they include visually similar faces selected from a large pool of demographically diversified identities. The dataset also includes metadata related to gender, country and age to facilitate fine-grained analysis of results. FaVCI2D is generated from freely distributable resources and is compliant with data protection regulations. Experiments with state-of-the-art deep models that provide nearly 100% performance on existing datasets show a significant performance drop for FaVCI2D, confirming our starting hypothesis. Equally important, we analyze legal and ethical challenges which appeared in recent years and hindered the development of face analysis research. We introduce a series of design choices which address these challenges and make the dataset constitution and usage more sustainable and fairer.