Can the usage of human growth hormones affect facial appearance and the accuracy of face recognition systems?

Abstract

In law enforcement and security applications, the acquisition of face images is critical in producing key trace evidence for the successful identification of potential threats. The goal of the study is to demonstrate that steroid usage significantly affects human facial appearance and hence, the performance of commercial and academic face recognition (FR) algorithms. In this work, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art FR algorithms on two unique face image datasets of subjects before (gallery set) and after (probe set) steroid (or human growth hormone) usage. For the purpose of this study, datasets of 73 subjects were created from multiple sources found on the Internet, containing images of men and women before and after steroid usage. Next, we geometrically pre-processed all images of both face datasets. Then, we applied image restoration techniques on the same face datasets, and finally, we applied FR algorithms in order to match the pre-processed face images of our probe datasets against the face images of the gallery set. Experimental results demonstrate that only a specific set of FR algorithms obtain the most accurate results (in terms of the rank-1 identification rate). This is because there are several factors that influence the efficiency of face matchers including (i) the time lapse between the before and after image pre-processing and restoration face photos, (ii) the usage of different drugs (e.g. Dianabol, Winstrol, and Decabolan), (iii) the usage of different cameras to capture face images, and finally, (iv) the variability of standoff distance, illumination and other noise factors (e.g. motion noise). All of the previously mentioned complicated scenarios make clear that cross-scenario matching is a very challenging problem and, thus, further investigation is required.