Facial soft biometrics for recognition in the wild: recent works, annotation and COTS evaluation

Abstract

The role of soft biometrics to enhance person recognition systems in unconstrained scenarios has not been extensively studied. Here, we explore the utility of the following modalities: gender, ethnicity, age, glasses, beard and moustache. We consider two assumptions: i) manual estimation of soft biometrics, and ii) automatic estimation from two Commercial Off-The-Shelf systems (COTS). All experiments are reported using the LFW database. First, we study the discrimination capabilities of soft biometrics standalone. Then, experiments are carried out fusing soft biometrics with two state-of-the-art face recognition systems based on deep learning. We observe that soft biometrics is a valuable complement to the face modality in unconstrained scenarios, with relative improvements up to 40%=15% in the verification performance when using manual/automatic soft biometrics estimation. Results are reproducible as we make public our manual annotations and COTS outputs of soft biometrics over LFW, as well as the face recognition scores