Labeled Faces in The Wild (LFW) is a database of face photographs designed for studying the problem of unconstrained face recognition." />
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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.
A few of the 5,749 people in the Labeled Faces in the Wild Dataset, thee most widely used face dataset for benchmarking face recognition algorithms.

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.

Biometric Trade Routes

To understand how this dataset has been used, its citations have been geocoded to show an approximate geographic digital trade route of the biometric data. Lines indicate an organization (education, commercial, or governmental) that has cited the LFW dataset in their research. Data is compiled from Semantic Scholar.

Academic
Industry
Government

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Supplementary Information for Labeled Faces in The Wild

Citations

Add information about how the citations were generated

Synthetic Faces

To visualize the types of photos in the dataset without explicitly publishing individual's identities a generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained on the entire dataset. The images in this video show a neural network learning the visual latent space and then interpolating between archetypical identities within the LFW dataset.

Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset
Synthetically generated face from the visual space of LFW dataset

Commercial Use of Labeled Faces in The Wild

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.

Code

The LFW dataset is so widely used that access to the facial data has built directly into a popular code library called Sci-Kit Learn. It includes a function called fetch_lfw_people to download the faces in the LFW dataset.

#!/usr/bin/python

import numpy as np
from sklearn.datasets import fetch_lfw_people
import imageio
import imutils

# download LFW dataset (first run takes a while)
lfw_people = fetch_lfw_people(min_faces_per_person=1, resize=1, color=True, funneled=False)

# introspect dataset
n_samples, h, w, c = lfw_people.images.shape
print(f'{n_samples:,} images at {w}x{h} pixels')
cols, rows = (176, 76)
n_ims = cols * rows

# build montages
im_scale = 0.5
ims = lfw_people.images[:n_ims]
montages = imutils.build_montages(ims, (int(w * im_scale,   int(h * im_scale)), (cols, rows))
montage = montages[0]

# save full montage image
imageio.imwrite('lfw_montage_full.png', montage)

# make a smaller version
montage = imutils.resize(montage, width=960)
imageio.imwrite('lfw_montage_960.jpg', montage)

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