OODFace: Benchmarking Robustness of Face Recognition under Common Corruptions and Appearance Variations

With the rise of deep learning, facial recognition technology has seen extensive research and rapid development. Although facial recognition is considered a mature technology, we find that existing open-source models and commercial algorithms lack robustness in certain real-world Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios, raising concerns about the reliability of these systems. In this paper, we introduce OODFace, which explores the OOD challenges faced by facial recognition models from two perspectives: common corruptions and appearance variations. We systematically design 30 OOD scenarios across 9 major categories tailored for facial recognition. By simulating these challenges on public datasets, we establish three robustness benchmarks: LFW-C/V, CFP-FP-C/V, and YTF-C/V. We then conduct extensive experiments on 19 different facial recognition models and 3 commercial APIs, along with extended experiments on face masks, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and defense strategies to assess their robustness. Based on the results, we draw several key insights, highlighting the vulnerability of facial recognition systems to OOD data and suggesting possible solutions. Additionally, we offer a unified toolkit that includes all corruption and variation types, easily extendable to other datasets. We hope that our benchmarks and findings can provide guidance for future improvements in facial recognition model robustness.

Multi-scale prediction for robust hand detection and classification

In this paper, we present a multi-scale Fully Convolutional Networks (MSP-RFCN) to robustly detect and classify human hands under various challenging conditions. In our approach, the input image is passed through the proposed network to generate score maps, based on multi-scale predictions. The network has been specifically designed to deal with small objects. It uses an architecture based on region proposals generated at multiple scales. Our method is evaluated on challenging hand datasets, namely the Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications (VIVA) Challenge and the Oxford hand dataset. It is compared against recent hand detection algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection for hands of various sizes.