  Face recognition has the perception of a solved problem, however when tested
at the million-scale exhibits dramatic variation in accuracies across the
different algorithms. Are the algorithms very different? Is access to good/big
training data their secret weapon? Where should face recognition improve? To
address those questions, we created a benchmark, MF2, that requires all
algorithms to be trained on same data, and tested at the million scale. MF2 is
a public large-scale set with 672K identities and 4.7M photos created with the
goal to level playing field for large scale face recognition. We contrast our
results with findings from the other two large-scale benchmarks MegaFace
Challenge and MS-Celebs-1M where groups were allowed to train on any
private/public/big/small set. Some key discoveries: 1) algorithms, trained on
MF2, were able to achieve state of the art and comparable results to algorithms
trained on massive private sets, 2) some outperformed themselves once trained
on MF2, 3) invariance to aging suffers from low accuracies as in MegaFace,
identifying the need for larger age variations possibly within identities or
adjustment of algorithms in future testings.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition