Extends the VR-005 protocol -- hold out one mugshot per actor, degrade
only the probe, match against a gallery held at native resolution,
decide through the Platt calibration -- from one axis to two, over 1670
actors rather than 100.
Joint rather than separable, because the interaction is the question: a
16 px face upscaled to 112 has already lost its high frequencies, so
further blur costs it almost nothing, while the same blur at full
resolution is expensive. Sweeping the axes independently would measure
each with the other implicitly at its best and miss that entirely.
Three blur families, compared at matched per-axis PSF spread rather than
at equal raw parameter. Optical defocus is a uniform disc whose transfer
function is a jinc with exact zeros, not a Gaussian that merely rolls
off, and it is also how a face ends up large and useless -- the case a
size filter cannot catch. Sweeping Gaussian alone, as the first version
did, understates real lens blur by a factor of five in error rate.
Every candidate measure is scored on every degraded crop and the
candidates are ranked by how well each predicts the pipeline's actual
decision, not by how smooth its synthetic ladder looks. Both a pooled
and a within-cell AUC are reported: they answer different questions and
the candidates rank differently under each.
Runs through sae_embed throughout. Stages gains optional engine paths so
the same study can drive a TRT build, which is what makes the full grid
five minutes rather than four and a half hours.
TRACES: VR-012, AR-028, AR-029 | SR-002
Deletes the Python ports of SCRFDDecoder, ArcFaceEmbedder, align_face,
enhance_for_retry and calibrate_gallery, and calls the shipped C++
instead. 297 lines removed, 108 added.
The ports existed because sae_embed only exposed embed(path), so a
caller could not embed a crop it had degraded. That gap is closed:
detect(), align_face(), enhance_for_retry(), embed_crop()/embed_crops()
and GalleryCalibration are bound now, so there is no longer a reason to
keep a second implementation of any of them.
The calibration is the one that mattered. A parallel copy of the sigmoid
is precisely where "always the calibrated probability, never a raw
cosine" (AR-024) breaks without anyone noticing — the copy goes on
returning plausible numbers after the original has moved. Scoring
through the binding makes the rule structural rather than remembered.
Verified against the committed run: same shape, FPI 0.0% at every size,
same operating point of 32 px. Absolute rates differ by 1-2 points
because this check sampled 100 actors / 574 crops against the original's
258 / 999, not because anything regressed.
Also: --providers and --batch are gone, since provider selection and
batching belong to the backend; embeds are chunked at its max_batch,
because the engine does not split an oversized request and a whole
gallery in one call asks CUDA for a multi-gigabyte buffer. DEDUP_SIM and
MIN_EMB_FOR_POSITIVE stay as mirrored constants — used only to report
the population the C++ fitted on, not to refit it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TRACES: VR-005 | AR-024
Holds out one mugshot per actor, degrades that probe to each candidate
face size and matches it against a gallery held at native resolution,
reporting TPI/FPI per size. Replaces AR-002's 66x66 px working estimate
with a measurement. Needs no video and no ground truth beyond the
mugshot cache already on disk.
LVFace-B over 258 actors, 999 gallery embeddings, threshold 0.754:
px 12 16 20 24 32 40 48+
TPI 6.6% 46.5% 81.8% 93.4% 98.1% 99.2% 99.2%
FPI is 0.000 at every size — a face too small to identify degrades to
unidentified, never to a wrong name. rank-1 holds at >=99.6% from 24 px
up, so what fails first is the calibrated probability crossing
threshold, not the ranking.
Two limits on reading this. FPI grows with the number of actors
competing, so 258 understates it against a production library. And
detection and alignment run on the native image with only the resulting
112x112 crop degraded, so landmark error at small face sizes is excluded
by construction and the curve is an upper bound — VR-010 measures the
same question end to end, and lands well above these numbers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TRACES: VR-005 | AR-002
dtourolle
