Research

Face Future (Katarina Borovina M.S. Thesis Student)

There is a dearth of research literature investigating the effects of cosmetics and beautification on face recognition technology.  This technology is being deployed more frequently as a means of unlocking smart phones, gaining access to financial information/buildings and logging into computing resources.  There have been some studies that have found that these algorithms don’t perform as well on women.  A longstanding question has been  does the application of cosmetics cause the degradation in performance/accuracy? This research will characterize/assess the impact of beautification and cosmetic appliances on the accuracy of biometric face recognition.  

To conduct a study on women, cosmetics, and face recognition, a huge part of the experiment is to collect the images of women over the Internet by creating a web portal which would allow women to upload multiple selfies to support this research:

1. No Makeup – an image where a person doesn’t have any makeup

2. Light Makeup – an image where a person does have very light amount of makeup (ex. foundation and a blush)

3. Heavy Makeup – an image where a person has full makeup (foundation, contouring, lipstick, blush, mascara, eyeshadow, etc.)

Collected images will be tested to assess whether or not the application of cosmetics reduce the performance/accuracy of facial recognition.

• ​Ensure your face is well-lit
• ​Move hair away from your face
• Keep camera/phone at least at arm's length
• ​Look straight at the camera

Please visit the following link to upload your pictures. Face Future - Image Upload