On the Impact of Alterations on Face Photo Recognition Accuracy

This work is framed into the context of automatic face recognition in electronic identity documents. In particular we study the impact of digital alteration of the face images used for enrollment on the recognition accuracy. Alterations can be produced both unintentionally (e.g., by the acquisition or printing device) or intentionally (e.g., people modify images to appear more attractive). Our results show that state-of-the-art algorithms are sufficiently robust to deal with some alterations whereas other kinds of degradation can significantly affect the accuracy, thus requiring the adoption of proper detection mechanisms.