ArtFace: Towards Historical Portrait Face Identification via Model Adaptation

Aug 28, 2025·
Francois Poh
,
Anjith George
Prof. Sébastien Marcel
Prof. Sébastien Marcel
· 0 min read
Abstract
Identifying sitters in historical paintings is a key task for art historians, offering insight into their lives and how they chose to be seen. However, the process is often subjective and limited by the lack of data and stylistic variations. Automated facial recognition is capable of handling challenging conditions and can assist, but while traditional facial recognition models perform well on photographs, they struggle with paintings due to domain shift and high intra-class variation. Artistic factors such as style, skill, intent, and influence from other works further complicate recognition. In this work, we investigate the potential of foundation models to improve facial recognition in artworks. By fine-tuning foundation models and integrating their embeddings with those from conventional facial recognition networks, we demonstrate notable improvements over current state-of-the-art methods. Our results show that foundation models can bridge the gap where traditional methods are ineffective.
Type
Publication
In (Non-Archival), ArtMetrics @ ICCV 2025
publications
Face Recognition Foundation Models Cultural Heritage Historical Portraits
Prof. Sébastien Marcel
Authors
Prof. Sébastien Marcel (he)
Senior Research Scientist
Prof Sébastien Marcel (IEEE Fellow and IAPR Fellow) is a senior research scientist at the Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), he heads the Biometrics Security and Privacy group and conducts research on face recognition, speaker recognition, vein recognition, attack detection (presentation attacks, morphing attacks, deepfakes) and template protection. He is also Professor at the University de Lausanne (UNIL) at the School of Criminal Justice. He is also the Director of the Swiss Center for Biometrics at Idiap, which conducts certifications of biometric products. He was Associate Editor and Guest Editor of IEEE journals (TBIOM, SPL, TIFS and SPM). He is also the lead Editor of the Springer Handbook of Biometrics Anti-Spoofing (Editions 1, 2 and 3). Since June 2025 he is a member of the Idiap Direction ad interim.