50 Years of Automated Face Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kim, Minchul, Jain, Anil, Liu, Xiaoming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915661614153728
author Kim, Minchul
Jain, Anil
Liu, Xiaoming
author_facet Kim, Minchul
Jain, Anil
Liu, Xiaoming
contents Over the past five decades, automated face recognition (FR) has progressed from handcrafted geometric and statistical approaches to advanced deep learning architectures that now approach, and in many cases exceed, human performance. This paper traces the historical and technological evolution of FR, encompassing early algorithmic paradigms through to contemporary neural systems trained on extensive real and synthetically generated datasets. We examine pivotal innovations that have driven this progression, including advances in dataset construction, loss function formulation, network architecture design, and feature fusion strategies. Furthermore, we analyze the relationship between data scale, diversity, and model generalization, highlighting how dataset expansion correlates with benchmark performance gains. Recent systems have achieved near-perfect large-scale identification accuracy, with the leading algorithm in the latest NIST FRTE 1:N benchmark reporting a FNIR of 0.15 percent at FPIR of 0.001 on a gallery of over 10 million identities. We delineate key open problems and emerging directions, including scalable training, multi-modal fusion, synthetic data, and interpretable recognition frameworks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_24247
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 50 Years of Automated Face Recognition
Kim, Minchul
Jain, Anil
Liu, Xiaoming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Over the past five decades, automated face recognition (FR) has progressed from handcrafted geometric and statistical approaches to advanced deep learning architectures that now approach, and in many cases exceed, human performance. This paper traces the historical and technological evolution of FR, encompassing early algorithmic paradigms through to contemporary neural systems trained on extensive real and synthetically generated datasets. We examine pivotal innovations that have driven this progression, including advances in dataset construction, loss function formulation, network architecture design, and feature fusion strategies. Furthermore, we analyze the relationship between data scale, diversity, and model generalization, highlighting how dataset expansion correlates with benchmark performance gains. Recent systems have achieved near-perfect large-scale identification accuracy, with the leading algorithm in the latest NIST FRTE 1:N benchmark reporting a FNIR of 0.15 percent at FPIR of 0.001 on a gallery of over 10 million identities. We delineate key open problems and emerging directions, including scalable training, multi-modal fusion, synthetic data, and interpretable recognition frameworks.
title 50 Years of Automated Face Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24247