Facial Recognition Vendor Test 2000
s recently as 1993, facial recognition was thought of as a technology that would probably never work, and if it did, it would have limited use in the real world. The Department of Defense (DOD) Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office's Face Recognition Technology Program (FERET) changed that opinion through numerous development efforts, data collection and evaluations. When FERET was completed in 1997, the algorithms that were merely in developers' minds four years earlier were being transitioned to the marketplace. Today, there are dozens of facial recognition systems available that have the potential to meet performance requirements for numerous applications. But which of these systems best meet the performance requirements for given applications? Repeated inquiries from numerous government agencies on the current state of facial recognition technology prompted the DOD Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office to establish a new set of evaluations. The Facial Recognition Vendor Test 2000 (FRVT 2000) was co-sponsored by the DOD Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and was administered last spring. This article provides an overview of FRVT 2000 and discusses follow-up efforts that will evaluate the feasibility of facial recognition in a correctional environment.