OCFR 2022: Competition on Occluded Face Recognition From Synthetically Generated Structure-Aware Occlusions

TL;DR

The IJCB-OCFR-2022 competition focused on advancing face recognition techniques under severe occlusions using synthetically occluded images, resulting in a new challenging benchmark and competitive solutions.

Contribution

This paper introduces a new occluded face recognition benchmark and evaluates innovative solutions in a competitive setting with synthetic occlusions.

Findings

Solutions performed competitively against the baseline.

The benchmark is realistic, diverse, and publicly available.

The competition attracted academic participation and generated valuable data.

Abstract

This work summarizes the IJCB Occluded Face Recognition Competition 2022 (IJCB-OCFR-2022) embraced by the 2022 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). OCFR-2022 attracted a total of 3 participating teams, from academia. Eventually, six valid submissions were submitted and then evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to address the challenge of face recognition in the presence of severe face occlusions. The participants were free to use any training data and the testing data was built by the organisers by synthetically occluding parts of the face images using a well-known dataset. The submitted solutions presented innovations and performed very competitively with the considered baseline. A major output of this competition is a challenging, realistic, and diverse, and publicly available occluded face recognition benchmark with well defined evaluation protocols.