DroneSURF: Benchmark Dataset for Drone-based Face Recognition

TLDR: This research presents a novel large-scale drone dataset, DroneSURF: Drone Surveillance of Faces, in order to facilitate research for face recognition, along with information regarding the data distribution, protocols for evaluation, and baseline results.

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are often used to reach remote areas or regions which are inaccessible to humans. Equipped with a large field of view, compact size, and remote control abilities, drones are deemed suitable for monitoring crowded or disaster-hit areas, and performing aerial surveillance. While research has focused on area monitoring, object detection and tracking, limited attention has been given to person identification, especially face recognition, using drones. This research presents a novel large-scale drone dataset, DroneSURF: Drone Surveillance of Faces, in order to facilitate research for face recognition. The dataset contains 200 videos of 58 subjects, captured across 411K frames, having over 786K face annotations. The proposed dataset demonstrates variations across two surveillance use cases: (i) active and (ii) passive, two locations, and two acquisition times. DroneSURF encapsulates challenges due to the effect of motion, variations in pose, illumination, background, altitude, and resolution, especially due to the large and varying distance between the drone and the subjects. This research presents a detailed description of the proposed DroneSURF dataset, along with information regarding the data distribution, protocols for evaluation, and baseline results.