Method, in one paragraph
A score with no published method is a rumour. Every verdict here uses the same three steps: the same subject rendered under the conditions being compared, the worst frame of each cell measured against a frozen reference, and then my eye, last, in writing. The gates, the reference frames and the two places the score is known to lie are all on this page.
Step one
Same subject, same seed, one variable changed. If two things changed, there is no verdict.
Step two
Worst frame per cell, measured against frozen references. Averages are not published.
Step three
My eye, in writing, after the number. When the two disagree I say so and the picture wins.
The method, in his own voice 14.34 s
Every verdict on this site has a number and a receipt. If I cannot show you the measurement, I have not earned the claim. That is the whole method, and it is why the failures are published too.
The gates, and where they came from
A gate is the floor a frame has to clear before it is worth publishing. These are the numbers in force today; when one moves, the move is filed as a verdict of its own.
| Cell | Gate | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| Close or medium | 0.60 | Below this the face reads as a different man to me, every time I have checked. |
| Body or room | 0.55 | A smaller face scores lower for reasons that have nothing to do with identity. |
| Wide | 0.55 | Kept deliberately low, and it is still the cell where a blind gate would throw away a good picture. |
Two places the score lies
It needs a face big enough to measure. Under roughly a hundred pixels the number falls for pixels, not for identity, and it will keep falling the wider the shot gets.
At a very tight crop it can find no face at all and report nothing. Plate nine on the archive page is the clearest face on this site and it scored nothing, which is the whole reason the right hand column of a receipt exists.
The reference frames
There is one reference frame, plate one, and it is frozen. Two of the three plates below are here because they are the failures the reference route produced, and they stay on the site.
