Improved likelihood ratios for face recognition in surveillance video by multimodal feature pairing

In forensic and security scenarios, accurate facial recognition in surveillance videos, often challenged by variations in pose, illumination, and expression, is essential. Traditional manual comparison methods lack standardization, revealing a critical gap in evidence reliability. We propose an enhanced images-to-video recognition approach, pairing facial images with attributes like pose and quality. Utilizing datasets such as ENFSI 2015, SCFace, XQLFW, ChokePoint, and ForenFace, we assess evidence strength using calibration methods for likelihood ratio estimation. Three models-ArcFace, FaceNet, and QMagFace-undergo validation, with the log-likelihood ratio cost (C) as a key metric. Results indicate that prioritizing high-quality frames and aligning attributes with reference images optimizes recognition, yielding similar C values to the top 25% best frames approach. A combined embedding weighted by frame quality emerges as the second-best method. Upon preprocessing facial images with the super resolution CodeFormer, it unexpectedly increased C, undermining evidence reliability, advising against its use in such forensic applications.