Unconstrained human identification using comparative facial soft biometrics

Soft biometrics are attracting a lot of interest with the spread of surveillance systems, and the need to identify humans at distance and under adverse visual conditions. Comparative soft biometrics have shown a significantly better impact on identification performance compared to traditional categorical soft biometrics. However, existing work that has studied comparative soft biometrics was based on small datasets with samples taken under constrained visual conditions. In this paper, we investigate human identification using comparative facial soft biometrics on a larger and more realistic scale using 4038 subjects from the View 1 subset of the LFW database. Furthermore, we introduce a new set of comparative facial soft biometrics and investigate the effect of these on identification and verification performance. Our experiments show that by using only 24 features and 10 comparisons, a rank-10 identification rate of 96.98% and a verification accuracy of 93.66% can be achieved.