A Method for Curation of Web-Scraped Face Image Datasets

Abstract

Web-scraped, in-the-wild datasets have become the norm in face recognition research. The numbers of subjects and images acquired in web-scraped datasets are usually very large, with number of images on the millions scale. A variety of issues occur when collecting a dataset in-the-wild, including images with the wrong identity label, duplicate images, duplicate subjects and variation in quality. With the number of images being in the millions, a manual cleaning procedure is not feasible. But fully automated methods used to date result in a less-than-ideal level of clean dataset. We propose a semi-automated method, where the goal is to have a clean dataset for testing face recognition methods, with similar quality across men and women, to support comparison of accuracy across gender. Our approach removes near-duplicate images, merges duplicate subjects, corrects mislabeled images, and removes images outside a defined range of pose and quality. We conduct the curation on the Asian Face Dataset (AFD) and VGGFace2 test dataset. The experiments show that a state-of-the-art method achieves a much higher accuracy on the datasets after they are curated. Finally, we release our cleaned versions of both datasets to the research community.

Publication
2020 International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF)