  In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face database from KIST,
denoted as K-FACE, and describe a novel capturing device specifically designed
to obtain the data. The K-FACE database contains more than 1 million
high-quality images of 1,000 subjects selected by considering the ratio of
gender and age groups. It includes a variety of attributes, including 27 poses,
35 lighting conditions, three expressions, and occlusions by the combination of
five types of accessories. As the K-FACE database is systematically constructed
through a hemispherical capturing system with elaborate lighting control and
multiple cameras, it is possible to accurately analyze the effects of factors
that cause performance degradation, such as poses, lighting changes, and
accessories. We consider not only the balance of external environmental
factors, such as pose and lighting, but also the balance of personal
characteristics such as gender and age group. The gender ratio is the same,
while the age groups of subjects are uniformly distributed from the 20s to 50s
for both genders. The K-FACE database can be extensively utilized in various
vision tasks, such as face recognition, face frontalization, illumination
normalization, face age estimation, and three-dimensional face model
generation. We expect systematic diversity and uniformity of the K-FACE
database to promote these research fields.
