Welcome to the Face Recognition Library. This library is designed to perform a fair comparison of face recognition algorithms. It contains scripts to execute various kinds of face recognition experiments on a variety of facial image databases, and running baseline algorithms is as easy as going to the command line and typing:

$ bin/baselines.py --database frgc --algorithm eigenface

This library is developed at the Biometrics group at the Idiap Research Institute. The FaceRecLib is designed to run face recognition experiments in a comparable and reproducible manner.

To achieve this goal, interfaces to many publicly available facial image databases are contained, and default evaluation protocols are defined, e.g.:

• Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2 [http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frgc.cfm]
• The Good, The Bad and the Ugly [http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/focs.cfm]
• Labeled Faces in the Wild [http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw]
• Multi-PIE [http://www.multipie.org]
• SCface [http://www.scface.org]
• MOBIO [http://www.idiap.ch/dataset/mobio]
• BANCA [http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/CVSSP/banca]
• CAS-PEAL [http://www.jdl.ac.cn/peal/index.html]
• AR face database [http://www2.ece.ohio-state.edu/~aleix/ARdatabase.html]
• XM2VTS [http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/CVSSP/xm2vtsdb]
• The AT&T database of faces (formerly known as ORL) [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/facedatabase.html]

Together with that, a broad variety of traditional and state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms such as:

• Eigenfaces [TP91]
• Linear Discriminant Analysis [ZKC+98]
• Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis [ESM+13]
• Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequences [ZSG+05]
• Graph Matching [GHW12]
• Gaussian Mixture Modeling [MM09]
• Inter-Session Variability Modeling [WMM+11]
• Bayesian Intrapersonal/Extrapersonal Classifier [MWP98]

is provided. Furthermore, tools to evaluate the results can easily be used to create scientific plots, and interfaces to run experiments using parallel processes or an SGE grid are provided.

On top of these already pre-coded algorithms, the FaceRecLib provides an easy Python interface for implementing new image preprocessors, feature types, face recognition algorithms or database interfaces, which directly integrate into the face recognition experiment. Hence, after a short period of coding, researchers can compare their new invention directly with already existing algorithms in a fair manner. Some of this code is provided as extensions of the FaceRecLib.

As a small example, we provide wrapper classes for the CSU face recognition resources, which you can download here in the xfacereclib.extension.CSU package. We have implemented wrappers for two face recognition algorithms:

• Local Region PCA [PBD+11]
• LDA-IR (a.k.a. CohortLDA) [LBP+12]

To see how easy it is to use these tools to generate a publication, please have a look at the source code xfacereclib.paper.BeFIT2012, with the according Paper being published in [GWC12].

Finally, all parts of the FaceRecLib are well documented and thoroughly tested to assure usability, stability and comparability.

To download the FaceRecLib, please go to http://pypi.python.org/pypi/facereclib, click on the download button and extract the .zip file to a folder of your choice.

The FaceRecLib is a satellite package of the free signal processing and machine learning library Bob, and some of its algorithms rely on the CSU Face Recognition Resources. These two dependencies have to be downloaded manually, as explained in the following.

This version of the FaceRecLib relies on Bob version 2 or greater. To install Packages of Bob, please read the Installation Instructions. For Bob to be able to work properly, some dependent packages are required to be installed. Please make sure that you have read the Dependencies for your operating system.

The most simple solution is to download and extract this package, go to the console and write:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout

This will download all required dependent packages and install them locally. If you don't want all the database packages to be downloaded, please remove the bob.db.[database] lines from the eggs section of the file buildout.cfg in the main directory before calling the three commands above.

Two open source algorithms are provided by the CSU Face Recognition Resources, namely the LRPCA and the LDA-IR (a.k.a. CohortLDA) algorithm. For these algorithms, optional wrapper classes are provided in the xfacereclib.extension.CSU satellite package. By default, this package is disabled. To enable the two algorithms, please call:

$ bin/buildout -c buildout-with-csu.cfg

after downloading and patching the CSU resources, and updating the csu-dir in the buildout-with-csu.cfg file -- as explained in xfacereclib.extension.CSU.

To verify that your installation worked as expected, you might want to run our test utilities:

$ bin/nosetests

Usually, all tests should pass, if you use the latest packages of Bob. With other versions of Bob, you might find some failing tests, or some errors might occur.

For further documentation on this package, please read the Stable Version or the Latest Version of the documentation. For a list of tutorials on this or the other packages ob Bob, or information on submitting issues, asking questions and starting discussions, please visit its website.

There are several file links in the documentation, which won't work correctly in the online documentation. To generate the documentation locally, type:

$ bin/sphinx-build doc sphinx
$ firefox sphinx/index.html

and read further instructions on how to use this library.

If you use the FaceRecLib in any of your experiments, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{Guenther_BeFIT2012,
       author = {G{\"u}nther, Manuel AND Wallace, Roy AND Marcel, S{\'e}bastien},
       editor = {Fusiello, Andrea AND Murino, Vittorio AND Cucchiara, Rita},
     keywords = {Biometrics, Face Recognition, Open Source, Reproducible Research},
        month = oct,
        title = {An Open Source Framework for Standardized Comparisons of Face Recognition Algorithms},
    booktitle = {Computer Vision - ECCV 2012. Workshops and Demonstrations},
       series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
       volume = {7585},
         year = {2012},
        pages = {547-556},
    publisher = {Springer Berlin},
     location = {Heidelberg},
          url = {http://publications.idiap.ch/downloads/papers/2012/Gunther_BEFIT2012_2012.pdf}
}

In case of further question or problems, feel free to start a new discussion in our Mailing List. When you have identified a clear bug, please go ahead and open a new ticket in our Issue Tracker.