Version 2
Last modified: Jan. 31, 2008
The DOD Counterdrug Technology Program sponsored the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) program and development of the FERET database. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is serving as Technical Agent for distribution of the FERET database. The goal of the FERET program is to develop new techniques, technology, and algorithms for the automatic recognition of human faces. As part of the FERET program, a database of facial imagery was collected between December 1993 and August 1996. The database is used to develop, test, and evaluate face recognition algorithms.
The Color FERET database was released on October 31, 2003, on a free pair of DVD-ROM's. It superseded the earlier releases of the database containing only grayscale versions of the images, which is still documented at:
http://www.nist.gov/humanid/feret
NEW DISTRIBUTION POLICY: Researchers will now receive the Color FERET Database of face images over the Internet.
The terms of release of the database are at: http://face.nist.gov/colorferet/release_agreement_v1.html
Complete instructions for obtaining the database are at: http://face.nist.gov/colorferet/request.html
Distribution by mailing DVD's has been halted, and will resume only if we encounter unforeseen problems with online distribution.
A list of Frequently Asked Questions and their answers is being compiled at: http://face.nist.gov/colorferet/faq.html
