5.5.4. The Labeled Faces in the Wild face recognition dataset

This dataset is a collection of JPEG pictures of famous people collected over the internet, all details are available on the official website:

Each picture is centered on a single face. The typical task is called Face Verification: given a pair of two pictures, a binary classifier must predict whether the two images are from the same person.

An alternative task, Face Recognition or Face Identification is: given the picture of the face of an unknown person, identify the name of the person by referring to a gallery of previously seen pictures of identified persons.

Both Face Verification and Face Recognition are tasks that are typically performed on the output of a model trained to perform Face Detection. The most popular model for Face Detection is called Viola-Jones and is implemented in the OpenCV library. The LFW faces were extracted by this face detector from various online websites.

5.5.4.1. Usage

scikit-learn provides two loaders that will automatically download, cache, parse the metadata files, decode the jpeg and convert the interesting slices into memmaped numpy arrays. This dataset size is more than 200 MB. The first load typically takes more than a couple of minutes to fully decode the relevant part of the JPEG files into numpy arrays. If the dataset has been loaded once, the following times the loading times less than 200ms by using a memmaped version memoized on the disk in the ~/scikit_learn_data/lfw_home/ folder using joblib.

The first loader is used for the Face Identification task: a multi-class classification task (hence supervised learning):

>>> from sklearn.datasets import fetch_lfw_people
>>> lfw_people = fetch_lfw_people(min_faces_per_person=70, resize=0.4)

>>> for name in lfw_people.target_names:
...     print(name)
...
Ariel Sharon
Colin Powell
Donald Rumsfeld
George W Bush
Gerhard Schroeder
Hugo Chavez
Tony Blair

The default slice is a rectangular shape around the face, removing most of the background:

>>> lfw_people.data.dtype
dtype('float32')

>>> lfw_people.data.shape
(1288, 1850)

>>> lfw_people.images.shape
(1288, 50, 37)

Each of the 1140 faces is assigned to a single person id in the target array:

>>> lfw_people.target.shape
(1288,)

>>> list(lfw_people.target[:10])
[5, 6, 3, 1, 0, 1, 3, 4, 3, 0]

The second loader is typically used for the face verification task: each sample is a pair of two picture belonging or not to the same person:

>>> from sklearn.datasets import fetch_lfw_pairs
>>> lfw_pairs_train = fetch_lfw_pairs(subset='train')

>>> list(lfw_pairs_train.target_names)
['Different persons', 'Same person']

>>> lfw_pairs_train.pairs.shape
(2200, 2, 62, 47)

>>> lfw_pairs_train.data.shape
(2200, 5828)

>>> lfw_pairs_train.target.shape
(2200,)

Both for the sklearn.datasets.fetch_lfw_people and sklearn.datasets.fetch_lfw_pairs function it is possible to get an additional dimension with the RGB color channels by passing color=True, in that case the shape will be (2200, 2, 62, 47, 3).

The sklearn.datasets.fetch_lfw_pairs datasets is subdivided into 3 subsets: the development train set, the development test set and an evaluation 10_folds set meant to compute performance metrics using a 10-folds cross validation scheme.

References: