Face Databases

Because of its nonrigidity and complex three-dimensional (3D) structure, the appearance of a face is affected by a large number of factors including identity, face pose, illumination, facial expression, age, occlusion, and facial hair. The development of algorithms robust to these variations requires databases of sufficient size that include carefully controlled variations of these factors. Furthermore, common databases are necessary to comparatively evaluate algorithms. Collecting a high quality database is a resource-intensive task: but the availability of public face databases is important for the advancement of the field. In this chapter we review 27 publicly available databases for face recognition, face detection, and facial expression analysis.