We have results in our face verification paper showing exactly how well people do on the LFW verification task. The answer is: very good, at 99.2%. However, we

We have results in our face verification paper showing exactly how well people do on the LFW verification task. The answer is: very good, at 99.2%. However, we also show that much of this is coming from the background and context in the images in LFW. The fact that those images were originally gathered from Yahoo News means that many images are taken at the same event -- with the same background and same clothes, etc., and people can use this to make good guesses, even without seeing the person's face! I think the vision community is thus looking for how to exploit context effectively. There have been a number of interesting approaches recently, from looking at "things" vs "stuff", to using additional information such as transcripts and captions, etc. And of course, there are still lots of people looking at how to better solve the basic recognition problem itself.