Evaluating the Complexity of Databases for Person Identification and Verification

Abstract

Abstract. For the development and evaluation of methods for person identi cation, veri cation, and other tasks, databases play an important role. Despite this fact, there exists no measure whether a given database is su cient to train and/or to test a given algorithm. This paper proposes a method to \grade" the complexity of a database, respectively to validate whether a database is appropriate for the simulation of a given application. Experiments support the argumentation that the complexity of a data set is not equivalent to its size. The \ rst nearest neighbor" method applied to image vectors is shown to perform reasonably well for person identication, respectively the mean square distance for person veri cation. This suggests to use them as a minimal performance measure for other algorithms.