Identical Twins as a Facial Similarity Benchmark for Human Facial Recognition

The problem of distinguishing identical twins and non-twin look-alikes in automated facial recognition (FR) applications has become increasingly important with the widespread adoption of facial biometrics. This work presents an application of one of the largest twin datasets compiled to date to address two FR challenges: 1) determining a baseline measure of facial similarity between identical twins and 2) applying this similarity measure to determine the impact of doppelgangers, or look-alikes, on FR performance for large face datasets. The facial similarity measure is determined via a deep convolutional neural network. The proposed network provides a quantitative similarity score for any two given faces and has been applied to large-scale face datasets to identify similar face pairs.