Using the Smooth Receiver Operating Curve (ROC) Method for Evaluation and Decision Making in Biometric Systems
Abstract This report presents the use of the smooth ROC method for evaluation of biometric systems, whichcan be used in developing decision making rules for face recognition triaging. From a performanceevaluation perspective, the problem can be decomposed into two subproblems: the first deals withdetecting the presence or absence of a specified person of interest (POI) in a given video frame,and the second measures the strength of matching between the POI image and the face found inthe video frame. The former can be viewed as a binary decision of detecting (or the lack thereof) and the latter is based on a score that depicts the strength of matching. Ideally, the objectiveof the system is to measure the agreement between higher matching scores with the presence ofPOI in the video frame based on the assumption that a higher matching score corresponds to ahigher likelihood of the POI being present in the frame. The accumulation of this performanceinformation across the stream of video frames will yield information required for performanceassessment analysis of the system as a whole.