Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge
Background
Over the last decade, numerous government and industry organizations have or are moving toward deploying automated biometric technologies to provide increased security for their systems and facilities. Six U.S. Government organizations recently sponsored the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC), Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2006 and the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) 2006. Results from the FRGC and FRVT 2006 documented two orders of magnitude improvement in the performance of face recognition under full-frontal, controlled conditions over the last 14 years. For the first time, ICE 2006 provided an independent assessment of multiple iris recognition algorithms on the same data set. However, further advances in these technologies are needed to meet the full range of operational requirements. Many of these requirements focus on biometric samples taken under less than ideal conditions, for example:
- Low quality still images
- High and low quality video imagery
- Face and iris images taken under varying illumination conditions
- Off-angle or occluded images
Building on the challenge problem and evaluation paradigm of FRGC, FRVT 2006, ICE 2005 and ICE 2006, the Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC) will address these problem areas.
MBGC Overview
The primary goal of the MBGC is to investigate, test and improve performance of face and iris recognition technology on both still and video imagery through a series of challenge problems and evaluation. The MBGC seeks to reach this goal through several technology development areas:
- Face recognition on still frontal, real-world-like high and low resolution imagery
- Iris recognition from video sequences and off-angle images
- Fusion of face and iris (at score and image levels)
- Unconstrained face recognition from still & video
- Recognition from Near Infrared (NIR) & High Definition (HD) video streams taken through portals
- Unconstrained face recognition from still & video
The MBGC will consist of a set of challenge problems designed to advance the current state of technology and conclude with a planned independent evaluation. Challenge problems will focus on three major areas:
- Iris and Face Recognition from Portal Video: the goal is to develop algorithms that recognize people from near infrared image sequences and high definition video sequences. The sequences will be acquired as people walk through a portal.
- Iris and Face Recognition from Controlled Images: the goal is to improve performance on iris and face imagery. Face data will be real-world-like high and low resolution images of frontal faces. Iris images will consist of still and video iris sequences.
- Still and Video Face: the goal is to advance recognition from unconstrained outdoor video sequences and still images.
These challenge problems will allow for fusion of face and iris at both the score level and the image level. Challenge problems will be defined more in-depth at the project's kick-off workshop.
MBGC Kick-Off
The MBGC was announced in December 2007 and the first MBGC workshop was held on April 18, 2008. The first challenge problems and data set were defined at this workshop and will be made available to requesting participants after May 1, 2008. Presentations from this workshop are posted on this website.
How to Participate in the MBGC
If you are interested in participating or receiving announcements about the MBGC project, please contact the MBGC Liaison at mbgc@nist.gov.
Please include your organizational business card with your request. You can either send it via email (to mgbc@nist.gov) or in hard copy. If you elect to send it via hard copy, please send it to the following address:
MBGC Sponsors
The Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC) would not be possible without our sponsors. The MBGC is sponsored by multiple U.S. Government Agencies that include the Department of Homeland Security, Science & Technology directorate; Director of National Intelligence's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA); the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and Operational Technology Division (OTD); the multi-agency Technical Support Working Group (TSWG), and the Department of Defense's Biometric Task Force (BTF).
Note: The identification of any commercial product or trade name does not imply endorsement or recommendation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology or our sponsors.
