CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION(S)

The present application is related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 16/400,303, filed May 1, 2019, entitled “Facial Recognition for Multi-Stream Video Using High Probability Group and Facial Network of Related Persons,” (now U.S. Pat. No. 11,010,599), incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

FIELD

The field relates generally to facial recognition techniques.

BACKGROUND

Facial recognition systems are used to identify or verify an identity of a person from images (including sequences of video frames) by comparing facial features with faces within a database. Facial recognition technology is often used for security, entertainment and archival tagging, for example. New deep learning techniques in face detection facilitate recognition of a very large number of people, by mapping faces (in images) into a high-dimensional Euclidean space. Each face is transformed into a feature vector which allows for a similarity comparison by calculating a distance between a face from a given image and other faces acquired from previous images. This database of faces can be very large. Thus, the size of the database may create a bottleneck when trying to recognize individuals at the edge of the Internet, for example, in real-time, due to computational needs and/or connectivity latency with the cloud.

A need therefore exists for improved techniques for facial recognition.

SUMMARY

In one embodiment, a method comprises maintaining a first database of facial images of a plurality of individuals; maintaining a second database of facial images comprising a subset of the individuals from the first database of images, wherein the subset is obtained based on a probability of individuals appearing in one or more sequences of image frames at a given time; obtaining the one or more sequences of image frames generated by one or more cameras; applying a face detection algorithm to at least one of the sequences of image frames to identify one or more faces in the one or more sequences of images; and applying a facial recognition to at least one sequence of image frames using at least the second database to identify one or more individuals in the at least one sequence of image frames.

In some embodiments, the second database is comprised of facial images of: (i) one or more individuals from a plurality of angles; (ii) one or more individuals that appeared in one or more prior image frames; and/or (iii) one or more individuals that appeared in at least one image frame generated by a plurality of cameras.

Other illustrative embodiments include, without limitation, apparatus, systems, methods and computer program products comprising processor-readable storage media.

