Performance assessment of face-verification based access control system

In recent years there has been much progress in the development of facial recognition systems. The FERET series of tests reported the black box performance of several such systems working on stored face images. Much less effort has been spent in studying the behaviour of systems under realistic conditions of use. We describe and analyse the result of a trial of a door access control system based on a model-based approach. The trial consisted of 10 registered users making over 200 accesses during a 2 week period. We describe the internal failure modes and the performance characteristics of the system, identify inter- and intra-person dependencies and make recommendations for future work.