Labeled Faces in The Wild (LFW) is the first facial recognition dataset created entirely from online photos
It includes 13,456 images of 4,432 people's images copied from the Internet during 2002-2004 and is the most frequently used dataset in the world for benchmarking face recognition algorithms.
Labeled Faces in the Wild
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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 is used to evaluate and improve the performance of facial recognition algorithms in academic, commercial, and government research. According to BiometricUpdate.com, 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
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.
Who used LFW?
This bar chart presents a ranking of the top countries where dataset citations originated. Mouse over individual columns to see yearly totals. These charts show at most the top 10 countries.
Biometric Trade Routes
To help understand how LFW has been used around the world by commercial, military, and academic organizations; existing publicly available research citing Labeled Faces in the Wild was collected, verified, and geocoded to show the biometric trade routes of people appearing in the images. Click on the markers to reveal research projects at that location.
- Academic
- Commercial
- Military / Government
Citation data is collected using
SemanticScholar.org then dataset usage verified and geolocated.
Dataset Citations
The dataset citations used in the visualizations were collected from Semantic Scholar, a website which aggregates and indexes research papers. Each citation was geocoded using names of institutions found in the PDF front matter, or as listed on other resources. These papers have been manually verified to show that researchers downloaded and used the dataset to trainĀ or test machine learning algorithms. If you use our data, please cite our work.
Supplementary Information
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
- "In our experiments, we used 10000 images and associated captions from the Faces in the wilddata set [3]."
- "This work was supported in part by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and National Science Foundation under CAREER award IIS-0546666 and grant IIS-0326249."
- From: "People-LDA: Anchoring Topics to People using Face Recognition" https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/People-LDA%3A-Anchoring-Topics-to-People-using-Face-Jain-Learned-Miller/10f17534dba06af1ddab96c4188a9c98a020a459 and https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4409055
- This paper was presented at IEEE 11th ICCV conference Oct 14-21 and the main LFW paper "Labeled Faces in the Wild: A Database for Studying Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments" was also published that same year
- 10f17534dba06af1ddab96c4188a9c98a020a459
- This research is based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via contract number 2014-14071600010.
- From "Labeled Faces in the Wild: Updates and New Reporting Procedures"
- 70% of people in the dataset have only 1 image and 29% have 2 or more images
- The LFW dataset is considered the "most popular benchmark for face recognition"
- The LFW dataset is "the most widely used evaluation set in the field of facial recognition"
- All images in LFW dataset were obtained "in the wild" meaning without any consent from the subject or from the photographer
- The faces in the LFW dataset were detected using the Viola-Jones haarcascade face detector [^lfw_website] [^lfw-survey]
- The LFW dataset is used by several of the largest tech companies in the world including "Google, Facebook, Microsoft Research Asia, Baidu, Tencent, SenseTime, Face++ and Chinese University of Hong Kong."
- All images in the LFW dataset were copied from Yahoo News between 2002 - 2004
- In 2014, two of the four original authors of the LFW dataset received funding from IARPA and ODNI for their followup paper Labeled Faces in the Wild: Updates and New Reporting Procedures via IARPA contract number 2014-14071600010
- The dataset includes 2 images of George Tenet, the former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the Central Intelligence Agency whose facial biometrics were eventually used to help train facial recognition software in China and Russia
- ./15/155205b8e288fd49bf203135871d66de879c8c04/paper.txt shows usage by DSTO Australia, supported parimal@iisc.ac.in
- There are about 3 men for every 1 woman in the LFW dataset
- 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