NIST splits FRVT into face biometrics and facial analysis evaluations

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is splitting the Face Recognition Vendor Test, renowned throughout the biometrics industry as the leading evaluation of facial recognition algorithms from developers around the world, into two.

The FRVT will be replaced with the Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) and the Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE), with the various tracks of the previous FRVT divided between them.

NIST notes in an announcement that the acronym “FRT” is widely used to refer to face biometrics.

FRTE includes the one-to-one and one-to-many algorithm accuracy evaluations, as well as a multimodal evaluation of face and iris biometrics and a twins demonstration. The API for the multimodal and twins track were released earlier this year, and a concept document is also available for the latter.

FATE is made up of the tracks dedicated to the processing and analysis of facial images. These include evaluations of morph detection algorithms, quality assessment, a second assessment track for specific image defect detection, presentation attack detection and age estimation.

Paravision says the move can help improve public and media comprehension of the technologies being evaluated in a blog post. The inclusion of tracks that assess tools for identification and authentication in the same group as analytical tools does not help with the common conflation of age estimation and emotion detection technologies with facial recognition, the company argues.

The branding split can therefore be understood as a natural next step following the expansion of the FRVT program to include these tools beyond the scope of biometric recognition.

Article Topics

biometric testing  |  Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE)  |  Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE)  |  Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)  |  facial analysis  |  facial recognition  |  NIST  |  Paravision