Efficient Aggregation of Face Embeddings for Decentralized Face Recognition Deployments

Ubiquitous authentication systems with a focus on privacy favor decentralized approaches as they reduce potential attack vectors, both on a technical and organizational level. The gold standard is to let the user be in control of where their own data is stored, which consequently leads to a high variety of devices used what in turn often incurs additional network overhead. Therefore, when using face recognition, an efficient way to compare faces is important in practical deployments. This paper proposes an efficient way to aggregate embeddings used for face recognition based on an extensive analysis on different datasets and the use of different aggregation strategies. As part of this analysis, a new dataset has been collected, which is available for research purposes. Our proposed method supports the construction of massively scalable, decentralized face recognition systems with a focus on both privacy and long-term usability.