Face recognition applications have grown in parallel with the size of datasets, complexity of deep learning models and computational power. However, while deep learning models evolve to become more capable and computational power keeps increasing, the datasets available are being retracted and removed from public access. Privacy and ethical concerns are relevant topics within these domains. Through generative artificial intelligence, researchers have put efforts into the development of completely synthetic datasets that can be used to train face recognition systems. Nonetheless, the recent advances have not been sufficient to achieve performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models trained on real data. To study the drift between the performance of models trained on real and synthetic datasets, we leverage a massive attribute classifier (MAC) to create annotations for four datasets: two real and two synthetic. From these annotations, we conduct studies on the distribution of each attribute within all four datasets. Additionally, we further inspect the differences between real and synthetic datasets on the attribute set. When comparing through the Kullback-Leibler divergence we have found differences between real and synthetic samples. Interestingly enough, we have verified that while real samples suffice to explain the synthetic distribution, the opposite could not be further from being true.

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Morphing Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SYN-MAD) held at the 2022 In-ternational Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). The competition attracted a total of 12 participating teams, both from academia and industry and present in 11 differ-ent countries. In the end, seven valid submissions were submitted by the participating teams and evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to present and at-tract solutions that deal with detecting face morphing at-tacks while protecting people's privacy for ethical and le-gal reasons. To ensure this, the training data was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations that led to out-performing the considered baseline in many experimental settings. The evaluation benchmark is now available at: https://github.com/marcohuber/SYN-MAD-2022.

This work summarizes the IJCB Occluded Face Recognition Competition 2022 (IJCB-OCFR-2022) embraced by the 2022 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). OCFR-2022 attracted a total of 3 participating teams, from academia. Eventually, six valid submissions were submitted and then evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to address the challenge of face recognition in the presence of severe face occlusions. The participants were free to use any training data and the testing data was built by the organisers by synthetically occluding parts of the face images using a well-known dataset. The submitted solutions presented innovations and performed very competitively with the considered baseline. A major output of this competition is a challenging, realistic, and diverse, and publicly available occluded face recognition benchmark with well defined evaluation protocols.

SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (M-M) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.

This paper presents a summary of the Masked Face Recognition Competitions (MFR) held within the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The competition attracted a total of 10 participating teams with valid submissions. The affiliations of these teams are diverse and associated with academia and industry in nine different countries. These teams successfully submitted 18 valid solutions. The competition is designed to motivate solutions aiming at enhancing the face recognition accuracy of masked faces. Moreover, the competition considered the deployability of the proposed solutions by taking the compactness of the face recognition models into account. A private dataset representing a collaborative, multisession, real masked, capture scenario is used to evaluate the submitted solutions. In comparison to one of the topperforming academic face recognition solutions, 10 out of the 18 submitted solutions did score higher masked face verification accuracy.