A high performance face recognition system based on a huge face database

Abstract

This paper presents a high performance face recognition system, in which the face database has a large amount of 2.5 million faces. Huge as the face database is, the recognition processes in ordinary ways meets with great difficulties: the identification rate of most algorithms may decline significantly; meanwhile, querying on a large-scale database may be quite time-consuming. In our system, a special distributed parallel architecture is proposed to speed up the computation. Furthermore, a multimodal part face recognition method based on principal component analysis (MMP-PCA) is adopted to perform the recognition task, and the MMX technology is introduced to accelerate the matching procedure. Practical results prove that this system has an excellent performance in recognition: when searching among 2,560,000 faces on 6 PC servers with Xeon 2.4 GHz CPU, the querying time is only 1.094 s and the identification rate is above 85% in most cases. Moreover, the greatest advantage of this system is not only increasing recognition speed but also breaking the upper limit of face data capacity. Consequently, the face data capability of this system can be extended to an arbitrarily large amount.