  In the past years, face recognition technologies have shown impressive
recognition performance, mainly due to recent developments in deep
convolutional neural networks. Notwithstanding those improvements, several
challenges which affect the performance of face recognition systems remain. In
this work, we investigate the impact that facial tattoos and paintings have on
current face recognition systems. To this end, we first collected an
appropriate database containing image-pairs of individuals with and without
facial tattoos or paintings. The assembled database was used to evaluate how
facial tattoos and paintings affect the detection, quality estimation, as well
as the feature extraction and comparison modules of a face recognition system.
The impact on these modules was evaluated using state-of-the-art open-source
and commercial systems. The obtained results show that facial tattoos and
paintings affect all the tested modules, especially for images where a large
area of the face is covered with tattoos or paintings. Our work is an initial
case-study and indicates a need to design algorithms which are robust to the
visual changes caused by facial tattoos and paintings.
