Abstract—Advancement and affordability is leading to popularity of
plastic surgery procedures. Facial plastic surgery can be reconstructive to
correct facial feature anomalies or cosmetic to improve the appearance.
Both corrective as well as cosmetic surgeries alter the original facial
information to a great extent thereby posing a great challenge for face
recognition algorithms. The contribution of this research is (i) preparing a
face database of 900 individuals for plastic surgery, and (ii) providing an
analytical and experimental underpinning of the effect of plastic surgery
on face recognition algorithms. The results on the plastic surgery database
suggest that it is an arduous research challenge and the current state-ofart
face recognition algorithms are unable to provide acceptable levels
of identification performance. Therefore, it is imperative to initiate a
research effort so that future face recognition systems will be able to
address this important problem.