Impact of Facial Tattoos and Paintings on Face Recognition Systems

TL;DR

This study examines how facial tattoos and paintings influence the accuracy and reliability of face recognition systems, revealing significant impacts especially with extensive facial coverage.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of facial tattoos and paintings on face recognition performance using a new database and multiple recognition systems.

Findings

Facial tattoos and paintings significantly reduce recognition accuracy.

Large coverage tattoos have a greater impact on system modules.

Current systems are not robust to visual alterations caused by tattoos and paintings.

Abstract

In the past years, face recognition technologies have shown impressive recognition performance, mainly due to recent developments in deep convolutional neural networks. Notwithstanding those improvements, several challenges which affect the performance of face recognition systems remain. In this work, we investigate the impact that facial tattoos and paintings have on current face recognition systems. To this end, we first collected an appropriate database containing image-pairs of individuals with and without facial tattoos or paintings. The assembled database was used to evaluate how facial tattoos and paintings affect the detection, quality estimation, as well as the feature extraction and comparison modules of a face recognition system. The impact on these modules was evaluated using state-of-the-art open-source and commercial systems. The obtained results show that facial tattoos and paintings affect all the tested modules, especially for images where a large area of the face is covered with tattoos or paintings. Our work is an initial case-study and indicates a need to design algorithms which are robust to the visual changes caused by facial tattoos and paintings.