One Million Faces Challenge Even the Best Facial Recognition Algorithms

Helen of Troy may have had the face that launched a thousand ships, but even the best facial recognition algorithms may have had trouble finding her face in a crowd of one million strangers. The first benchmark test based on one million faces has shown how facial recognition algorithms from Google and other research groups around the world can still fall short in accurately identifying and verifying faces. Facial recognition algorithms that had previously performed with more than 95 percent accuracy on a popular benchmark test involving 13,000 faces saw significant drops in accuracy when faced with the new MegaFace Challenge involving one million faces. The best performer on one test, Google's FaceNet algorithm, dropped from near-perfect accuracy on five-figure datasets to 75 percent on the million-face test. Other top algorithms dropped from above 90-percent accuracy on the small datasets to below 60 percent on the MegaFace Challenge.