The Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) program was a government-sponsored project that aimed to create a large, automatic face-recognition system for intelligence, security, and law enforcement purposes.
[1] The program began in 1993 under the combined leadership of Dr. Harry Wechsler at George Mason University (GMU) and Dr. Jonathon Phillips at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland and resulted in the development of the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) database.
[2] The goal of the FERET program was to advance the field of face recognition technology by establishing a common database of facial imagery for researchers to use and setting a performance baseline for face-recognition algorithms.
[5] The origin of facial recognition technology is largely attributed to Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe and his work in the 1960s, when he developed a system to identify faces from a database of thousands of photographs.
The only notable exceptions were the following:[7] The lack of a common database made it difficult to compare the results of face recognition studies in the scientific literature because each report involved different assumptions, scoring methods, and images.