Face Recognition on Drones: Issues and Limitations

Drones, as known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), are aircrafts which can perform autonomous pilot. They can easily reach locations which are too difficult to reach or dangerous for human beings and collect images from bird's-eye view through aerial photography. Enabling drones to identify people on the ground is important for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, people search, and remote monitoring. Since faces are part of inherent identities of people, how well face recognition technologies can be used by drones becomes essential for future development of the above applications. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies to evaluate several factors that may influence the performance of face detection and recognition techniques on drones. Our findings show that the current face recognition technologies are capable of recognizing faces on drones with some limits in distance and angle, especially when drones take pictures in high altitudes and the face image is taken from a long distance and with a large angle of depression. We also find that augmenting face models with 3D information may help to boost recognition performance in the case of large angles of depression.