Indian Movie Face Database: A benchmark for face recognition under wide variations

Recognizing human faces in the wild is emerging as a critically important, and technically challenging computer vision problem. With a few notable exceptions, most previous works in the last several decades have focused on recognizing faces captured in a laboratory setting. However, with the introduction of databases such as LFW and Pubfigs, face recognition community is gradually shifting its focus on much more challenging unconstrained settings. Since its introduction, LFW verification benchmark is getting a lot of attention with various researchers contributing towards state-of-the-results. To further boost the unconstrained face recognition research, we introduce a more challenging Indian Movie Face Database (IMFDB) that has much more variability compared to LFW and Pubfigs. The database consists of 34512 faces of 100 known actors collected from approximately 103 Indian movies. Unlike LFW and Pubfigs which used face detectors to automatically detect the faces from the web collection, faces in IMFDB are detected manually from all the movies. Manual selection of faces from movies resulted in high degree of variability (in scale, pose, expression, illumination, age, occlusion, makeup) which one could ever see in natural world. IMFDB is the first face database that provides a detailed annotation in terms of age, pose, gender, expression, amount of occlusion, for each face which may help other face related applications.