IARPA Janus Benchmark-B Face Dataset

Abstract

Despite the importance of rigorous testing data for evaluating face recognition algorithms, all major publicly available faces-in-the-wild datasets are constrained by the use of a commodity face detector, which limits, among other conditions, pose, occlusion, expression, and illumination variations. In 2015, the NIST IJB-A dataset, which consists of 500 subjects, was released to mitigate these constraints. However, the relatively low number of impostor and genuine matches per split in the IJB-A protocol limits the evaluation of an algorithm at operationally relevant assessment points. This paper builds upon IJB-A and introduces the IARPA Janus Benchmark-B (NIST IJB-B) dataset, a superset of IJB-A. IJB-B consists of 1,845 subjects with human-labeled ground truth face bounding boxes, eye/nose locations, and covariate metadata such as occlusion, facial hair, and skintone for 21,798 still images and 55,026 frames from 7,011 videos. IJB-B was also designed to have a more uniform geographic distribution of subjects across the globe than that of IJB-A. Test protocols for IJB-B represent operational use cases including access point identification, forensic quality media searches, surveillance video searches, and clustering. Finally, all images and videos in IJB-B are published under a Creative Commons distribution license and, therefore, can be freely distributed among the research community.