Back propagation neural networks for facial verification

We conducted a test to determine the aptitude of neural networks to recognize human faces. The pictures we collected of 511 subjects captured both profiles and many natural expressions. Some of the subjects were wearing glasses, sunglasses, or hats in some of the pictures. The images were compressed by a factor of 100 and converted into image vectors of 1400 pixels. The image vectors were fed into a back propagation neural network with one hidden layer and one output node. The networks were trained to recognize one target person and to reject all other persons. Neural networks for 37 target subjects were trained with 8 different training sets that consisted of different subsets of the data. The networks were then tested on the rest of the data, which consisted of 7000 or more unseen pictures. Results indicate that a false acceptance rate of less than 1 percent can be obtained, and a false rejection rate of 2 percent can be obtained when certain restrictions are followed.