UMIST Face Database:
The UMIST Face Database consists of 564 images of 20 people. Each covers a range of poses from profile to frontal views. Subjects cover a range of race/sex/appearance. Each subject exists in their own directory labelled 1a, 1b, ... 1t and images are numbered sequentially as they were taken. The files are all in PGM format, approximately 220 x 220 pixels in 256 shades of grey. Pre-cropped versions of the images may be made available by contactingDaniel Graham.
Yale Face Database:
The Yale Face Database (size 6.4MB) contains 165 grayscale images in GIF format of 15 individuals. There are 11 images per subject, one per different facial expression or configuration: center-light, w/glasses, happy, left-light, w/no glasses, normal, right-light, sad, sleepy, surprised, and wink.
PurdueU Database:
Available at:
The XM2VTS Database:Multi-model personal verification is one of the most promising approaches to user-friendly highly security personal verification systems. The XM2VTS Database contains 1,180 Color frontal images ( 720X576 PPM image file, one picture per person, 4 sessions ), 2,360 side-profile images ( right profile, left profile, per person, per session ), 32 KHz 16-bit sound, video sequences, 3D model.
The UCD colour face image database for face detection:
The database has two parts. The first part contains a 100 colour images of faces with variations in background (indoors, outdoors, complex, simple) facial structural components (beards, moustaches, and glasses), poses (frontal, near-frontal, profile), orientation (upright and upside down), facial expressions, imaging conditions (poor quality, good quality) occluded areas, age, gender, race and size. The images have been captured from the following sources:
Digital Cameras
Pictures scanned in using a scanner
Images from the World Wide Web
Images from existing face recognition and detection databases.
It should be noted that all the pictures in the database are original pictures from the source without performing any processing such as colour correction, sharpening, noise removal, etc. This ensures that the images in the database reflect actual images that might be encountered by face detection algorithms. No restrictions are imposed on the face size or image resolution. Details of the database are shown in Table 1 in terms of 3D pose, orientation, structural components and occlusion.
While no standard terms exist to define face pose and orientation, researchers often use their own terminology such as frontal, near-frontal, half-profile, profile, semi-frontal, tilted etc. This paper defines the terminology used to describe faces in the UCD Colour Face Image Database as follows:
3D Pose of the Face:
Frontal: A frontal view is a mugshot–type view where the sagittal plane of the body divides the face in half.
Profile: A side-view of the face where the plane of the image divides the face in half.
Intermediate: A face pose that is neither frontal nor profile.
The definitions above are subjective as accurate pose estimation is an entirely different area of research. Our definitions only serve the purpose of comparing the performance of face detection algorithms for different poses.
Orientation of the Face:
Upright: A face is considered upright if the major axis of the best-fit ellipse makes an angle of less than ±150 with the vertical axis.
Rotated: Faces outside the above range are defined as rotated.
Occluded Face:A face is occluded if the entire face region is not clearly visible. Other faces or objects in the image can occlude faces.
Structural Components:Structural components such as glasses, sunglasses, beards and moustaches present a real challenge in face detection and are also noted for each face in the image.
Table 1 UCD Colour Face Image Database
BioID Face DB:
Available at:
MIT CBCL Face Data Set:
Available at:
FERET Database:
Available at:
AT&T (Olivettti) Database (ORL):
Available at:
PIE Database:
Available at:
IMM Face Database:
Available at:The IMM Face Database comprises 240 still images of 40 different human faces, all without glasses. The gender distribution is 7 females and 33 males. Images were acquired in January 2001 using a 640x480 JPEG format with a Sony DV video camera, DCR-TRV900E PAL.
CMU Face Database:
The image dataset is used by the frontal view ground truth
profile view ground truth
http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/idb/images/face/profile_images/testing_profile_ground_truth.dat
The CMU profile face set consists of 208 images with 441 faces of which 347 are profile views.
The Champions database:
This database contains 236 images of Champions database, and each image involves one face.
Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Database:
The JAFFE database consists of 213 images of 7 different emotional facial expressions.
Face Sketch Database:
The face sketch Database is provided by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which contains 21 face sketches and their corresponding photo images. Besides, there are another 15 photo images without corresponding sketches. All images in the Database are frontal and gray.
collected by F.R&A Group, July, 2006