That is a great point. Some of this is due to privacy issues -- since my school's IRB board considers "Face recognition" to be "human experimentation," anyone w

That is a great point. Some of this is due to privacy issues -- since my school's IRB board considers "Face recognition" to be "human experimentation," anyone who collects these datasets in a laboratory setting should go to the trouble to ensure that the subjects inside the datasets are treated fairly. Part of that means vetting who they give the dataset to. Sometimes there's bunch of red tap and silly rules about "When you show people dataset samples, you can only use these images... ..." Many of the high-quality pose-controlled sets require you to physically write to some student and request to enter into a license agreement with that institution, even though the dataset might be "free" to access. There are other datasets from around the web that are much easier to get your hands on. LFW is honestly a great way to start, since it's freely available and since the "Results" page provides links to many state-of-the-art papers in the field (with PDF links for most of them, too!) "YouTube Faces" is also another good one, containing videos: http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~wolf/ytfaces/ http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~wolf/ytfaces/ Columbia has a few great datasets like "PubFig," which are distributed as lists of image URLs that you can download: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/databases/pubfig/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/databases/pubfig/ See also: http://www.face-rec.org/databases/ http://www.face-rec.org/databases/ If you do want something pose-controlled and high quality, you might just have to bite the bullet and write to the curators of "Multi-PIE" or "PIE" at CMU.