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Labeled Faces in The Wild (LFW) is a database of face photographs designed for studying the problem of unconstrained face recognition.
It includes 13,456 images of 4,432 people's images copied from the Internet during 2002-2004.
Created
2002 – 2004
Images
13,233
Identities
5,749
Origin
Yahoo! News Images
Used by
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, SenseTime, Face++, CIA, NSA, IARPA
Website
  • There are about 3 men for every 1 woman in the LFW dataset 1
  • The person with the most images is George W. Bush with 530
  • There are about 3 George W. Bush's for every 1 Tony Blair
  • The LFW dataset includes over 500 actors, 30 models, 10 presidents, 124 basketball players, 24 football players, 11 kings, 7 queens, and 1 Moby
  • In all 3 of the LFW publications [^lfw_original_paper], [^lfw_survey], [^lfw_tech_report] the words "ethics", "consent", and "privacy" appear 0 times
  • The word "future" appears 71 times
  • * denotes partial funding for related research

Labeled Faces in the Wild

Labeled Faces in The Wild (LFW) is "a database of face photographs designed for studying the problem of unconstrained face recognition 1. It is used to evaluate and improve the performance of facial recognition algorithms in academic, commercial, and government research. According to BiometricUpdate.com 3, LFW is "the most widely used evaluation set in the field of facial recognition, LFW attracts a few dozen teams from around the globe including Google, Facebook, Microsoft Research Asia, Baidu, Tencent, SenseTime, Face++ and Chinese University of Hong Kong."

The LFW dataset includes 13,233 images of 5,749 people that were collected between 2002-2004. LFW is a subset of Names of Faces and is part of the first facial recognition training dataset created entirely from images appearing on the Internet. The people appearing in LFW are...

The Names and Faces dataset was the first face recognition dataset created entire from online photos. However, Names and Faces and LFW are not the first face recognition dataset created entirely "in the wild". That title belongs to the UCD dataset. Images obtained "in the wild" means using an image without explicit consent or awareness from the subject or photographer.

The Names and Faces dataset was the first face recognition dataset created entire from online photos. However, Names and Faces and LFW are not the first face recognition dataset created entirely "in the wild". That title belongs to the UCD dataset. Images obtained "in the wild" means using an image without explicit consent or awareness from the subject or photographer.

All 5,379 people in the Labeled Faces in The Wild Dataset. Showing one face per person
All 5,379 people in the Labeled Faces in The Wild Dataset. Showing one face per person

The Names and Faces dataset was the first face recognition dataset created entire from online photos. However, Names and Faces and LFW are not the first face recognition dataset created entirely "in the wild". That title belongs to the UCD dataset. Images obtained "in the wild" means using an image without explicit consent or awareness from the subject or photographer.

The Names and Faces dataset was the first face recognition dataset created entire from online photos. However, Names and Faces and LFW are not the first face recognition dataset created entirely "in the wild". That title belongs to the UCD dataset. Images obtained "in the wild" means using an image without explicit consent or awareness from the subject or photographer.

Information Supply Chain

To understand how and where this dataset has been used, organizations using the dataset are plotted below. The data is generated by collecting all citations for all the original research papers associated with the dataset. The PDFs are then converted to text and the organization names are extracted and geocoded. Because of the automated approach to extracting data, not all organizations have been confirmed as using the dataset. This visualization is provided to help locate and confirm usage and will be updated as data noise is reduced.

Academic
Industry
Government
Data is compiled from Semantic Scholar and not yet manually verified.

Supplementary Information

Citations

Citations were collected from Semantic Scholar, a website which aggregates and indexes research papers. Metadata was extracted from these papers, including extracting names of institutions automatically from PDFs, and then the addresses were geocoded. Data is not yet manually verified, and reflects anytime the paper was cited. Some papers may only mention the dataset in passing, while others use it as part of their research methodology.

Add button/link to download CSV

This bar chart presents a ranking of the top countries where citations originated. Mouse over individual columns to see yearly totals. Colors are only assigned to the top 10 overall countries.

Commercial Use

Add a paragraph about how usage extends far beyond academia into research centers for largest companies in the world. And even funnels into CIA funded research in the US and defense industry usage in China.

Research, text, and graphics ©Adam Harvey / megapixels.cc