Study on synthetic face database for performance evaluation

Abstract

We have analyzed the vulnerability and threat of the biometric evaluation database and proposed the method to generate a synthetic database from a real database. Our method is characterized by finding nearest neighbor triples or pairs in the feature space of biometric samples, and by crossing over those triples and pairs to generate synthetic samples. The advantages of our method is that we can keep the statistical distribution of the original database, thus, the evaluation result is expected to be the same as original real database. The proposed database, which does not have privacy problem, can be circulated freely among biometric vendors and testers. We have implemented this idea on a face image database using active appearance model. The synthesized image database has the same distance distribution with the original database, which suggests it will deriver the same accuracy with the original one. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.