Face Recognition for Look-Alikes: A Preliminary Study

One of the major challenges of face recognition is to design a feature extractor and matcher that reduces the intra-class variations and increases the inter-class variations. The feature extraction algorithm has to be robust enough to extract similar features for a particular subject despite variations in quality, pose, illumination, expression, aging, and disguise. The problem is exacerbated when there are two individuals with lower inter-class variations, i.e., lookalikes. In such cases, the intra-class similarity is higher than the inter-class variation for these two individuals. This research explores the problem of look-alike faces and their effect on human performance and automatic face recognition algorithms.