Second FRCSyn-onGoing: Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analysis to Improve Face Recognition with Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or the ability to customize it to adapt to specific problem-solving needs. To effectively use such data, face recognition models should also be specifically designed to exploit synthetic data to its fullest potential. In order to promote the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and investigate the application of synthetic data to better train face recognition systems, we introduce the 2nd FRCSyn-onGoing challenge, based on the 2nd Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn), originally launched at CVPR 2024. This is an ongoing challenge that provides researchers with an accessible platform to benchmark i) the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and ii) novel face recognition systems that are specifically proposed to take advantage of synthetic data. We focus on exploring the use of synthetic data both individually and in combination with real data to solve current challenges in face recognition such as demographic bias, domain adaptation, and performance constraints in demanding situations, such as age disparities between training and testing, changes in the pose, or occlusions. Very interesting findings are obtained in this second edition, including a direct comparison with the first one, in which synthetic databases were restricted to DCFace and GANDiffFace.

@article{deandres-tame2025_2412.01383,
  title={ Second FRCSyn-onGoing: Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analysis to Improve Face Recognition with Synthetic Data },
  author={ Ivan DeAndres-Tame and Ruben Tolosana and Pietro Melzi and Ruben Vera-Rodriguez and Minchul Kim and Christian Rathgeb and Xiaoming Liu and Luis F. Gomez and Aythami Morales and Julian Fierrez and Javier Ortega-Garcia and Zhizhou Zhong and Yuge Huang and Yuxi Mi and Shouhong Ding and Shuigeng Zhou and Shuai He and Lingzhi Fu and Heng Cong and Rongyu Zhang and Zhihong Xiao and Evgeny Smirnov and Anton Pimenov and Aleksei Grigorev and Denis Timoshenko and Kaleb Mesfin Asfaw and Cheng Yaw Low and Hao Liu and Chuyi Wang and Qing Zuo and Zhixiang He and Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Anjith George and Alexander Unnervik and Parsa Rahimi and Sébastien Marcel and Pedro C. Neto and Marco Huber and Jan Niklas Kolf and Naser Damer and Fadi Boutros and Jaime S. Cardoso and Ana F. Sequeira and Andrea Atzori and Gianni Fenu and Mirko Marras and Vitomir Štruc and Jiang Yu and Zhangjie Li and Jichun Li and Weisong Zhao and Zhen Lei and Xiangyu Zhu and Xiao-Yu Zhang and Bernardo Biesseck and Pedro Vidal and Luiz Coelho and Roger Granada and David Menotti },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.01383},
  year={ 2025 }
}