ABSTRACT
In order to compare different techniques of face detection and recognition and also to assess how well those methods work, several face images databases have been developed. The number of databases and the size of the gallery and probe sets used for testing a system are indicative of the robustness of the methods. Several face databases are thus generated by different research groups which provide as many variations as possible on their images. Each database is designed to address specific challenges covering a wide range of scenarios. While existing publicly available face databases contain face images with a wide variety of poses, illumination angles, gestures, face occlusions and illuminant colors, these images have not been adequately annotated, thus limiting their usefulness for evaluating the relative performance of face detection algorithms. For example, many of the images in existing databases
FIGURE 14.1: Sample images from ORL dataset
are not annotated with the exact pose angles at which they were taken. Descriptions of some of the datasets are given in the following subsections. The entire set of images, as well as the annotations and the experimental results, is being placed in the public domain and made available for download over the worldwide web.
