Who Built FERET

The FERET program (1993–1998) produced the facial-recognition benchmark dataset — the same ColorFERET data analyzed elsewhere on this site. It was funded through a Department of Defense counterdrug office, run out of the Army Research Laboratory and George Mason University, and built by five university and contractor labs. When the program ended, NIST inherited the dataset and turned its evaluation protocol into the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) — the benchmark series the FBI and DHS now use to guide facial-recognition deployment.