More Examples, More Competitors: The Reference-Photo Budget in Closed-Set Face Matching

Authors

  • George Wells Author
  • Henry Collins Author
  • Ryan King Author

Abstract

Adding reference photographs helps a nearest-gallery matcher see more of each person, but also gives competing identities more opportunities to look similar. On one fixed Olivetti split, increasing the gallery from one to three and five photographs per identity raised correctness from 56.0% to 75.5% and 85.5%. The five-photo policy corrected sixty formerly wrong queries and made one formerly correct query wrong. This transparent pixel-based experiment measures the value of a reference budget within a known roster. It does not estimate the number of images needed by a learned identity-preserving generator.

Public-data research draft. Conditional benchmark analysis; final scientific and publication review is pending.

Original publication: October 24, 2026.

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Published

2026-10-24

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026): Inaugural Issue

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Articles

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Copyright (c) 2026 George Wells, Henry Collins, Ryan King

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.