Masked Face Recognition: Human vs. Machine

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on hygienic and contactless identity verification methods. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition in a collaborative environment is currently sensitive yet understudied issue. Recent reports have tackled this by evaluating the masked probe effect on the performance of automatic face recognition solutions. However, such solutions can fail in certain processes, leading to performing the verification task by a human expert. This work provides a joint evaluation and in-depth analyses of the face verification performance of human experts in comparison to state-of-the-art automatic face recognition solutions. This involves an extensive evaluation with 12 human experts and 4 automatic recognition solutions. The study concludes with a set of take-home-messages on different aspects of the correlation between the verification behavior of human and machine.