FRVT 2006 Results now available!  [Download]

Face Recognition Vendor Tests (FRVT) provide independent government evaluations of commercially available and prototype face recognition technologies. These evaluations are designed to provide U.S. Government and law enforcement agencies with information to assist them in determining where and how facial recognition technology can best be deployed. In addition, FRVT results help identify future research directions for the face recognition community.

FRVT 2006 follows five previous face recognition technology evaluations - three FERET evaluations (1994, 1995 and 1996) and FRVT 2000 and 2002. The FERET program introduced evaluations to the face recognition community and helped advance face recognition from its infancy to the prototype system stage. By 2000, face recognition technology had matured from prototype systems to commercial systems. The Face Recognition Vendor Test 2000 (FRVT 2000) measured the capabilities of these systems and their technical progress since the last FERET evaluation. Public interest in face recognition technology had risen significantly by 2002. FRVT 2002 was designed to measure technical progress since 2000, to evaluate performance on real-life large-scale databases, and to introduce new experiments to help understand face recognition performance better. Since FRVT 2002, a number of new face recognition technologies have been developed that have the promise of improving performance by an order of magnitude. The Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) was organized to develop new face recognition technologies. The technologies being developed under FRGC include high resolution still image, three dimensional face scans, and multiple sample still imagery. FRVT 2006 will determine if the goals of FRGC are meet; progress in face recognition since FRVT 2002; and effectiveness of new face recognition technologies being developed.