Lessons from collecting a million biometric samples

Over the past decade, independent evaluations have become commonplace in many areas of experimental computer science, including face and gesture recognition. A key attribute of many successful independent evaluations is a curated data set. Desired aspects associated with these data sets include appropriateness to the experimental design, a corpus size large enough to allow statistically rigorous characterization of results, and the availability of comprehensive metadata that allow inferences to be made on various data set attributes. In this paper, we review a ten-year biometric sampling effort that enabled the creation of several key biometrics challenge problems. We summarize the design and execution of data collections, identify key challenges, and convey some lessons learned.