Gallery vs Probe
Definition
In facial recognition, the gallery is the reference database of enrolled face images; the probe is the query image being compared against the gallery. A system searches the gallery for images close to the probe embedding.
- Gallery
- Reference database of enrolled face images
- Probe
- Query image being searched
- System task
- Find gallery images close to the probe embedding
Common questions
How does gallery size affect the reliability of a facial recognition match?+
A larger gallery increases the chance of a coincidental close match to an innocent person, so the same probe search against a small watchlist and a nationwide database can produce very different confidence levels for what looks like a similar candidate score.
Why does probe image quality matter more than gallery quality in most investigations?+
Gallery images are often controlled enrolment photos, but the probe image frequently comes from CCTV or a low-quality photograph with poor lighting or angle, and this quality gap is usually the dominant source of false or missed matches.
Related terms
- ArcFace / FaceNet
- Two influential deep CNN facial recognition architectures. FaceNet (Google, 2015) used a triplet-loss training approach to learn facial embeddings. ArcFace (Deng et...
- Embedding
- A compact numerical vector representation of a face produced by a neural network. The distance between two embeddings in the vector space...
- False Match Rate (FMR)
- The proportion of non-mate comparisons (different individuals) that the system incorrectly scores as a match. Also called the false positive rate or...
- False Non-Match Rate (FNMR)
- The proportion of mate comparisons (same individual) that the system incorrectly scores as non-matching. Also called the false negative rate. A lower...
- NIST FRVT
- The National Institute of Standards and Technology Face Recognition Vendor Testing programme, the primary independent benchmark for facial recognition algorithms, publishing ongoing...