Human Face Identification Research Articles

Pattern Recognition

During the past fifteen years, there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition. This interest has created an increasing need for theoretical methods and experimental software and hardware for use in the design of pattern recognition systems. A number of books have been published on this subject,1-16and some special pattern recognition machines have been designed and built for practical use. Applications of pattern recognition include character recognition,12target detection, medical diagnosis, analysis of biomedical signals and images, remote sensing, identification of human faces and fingerprints, reliability,17socio-economics,18speech recognition and understanding,19and machine parts recognition.

Identification of human faces

How well can human faces be identified by humans and by computers, using subjectively judged descriptions like long ears, wide-set eyes, etc.? Three classes of experiments are reported: 1) Gathering, analysis, and assessment of face-feature data for 255 faces. 2) Computer identification-studies. 3) Human identification-studies. A set of 22 features was evolved from an initially larger set to provide relevant, distinctive, relatively independent measures which can be judged reliably. Computer studies and a mathematical model established limits of performance of a person attempting to isolate a face from a population using feature descriptions. The model predicts that under certain conditions approximately 6 of an individual's features are required to isolate him from a population of 255. Human experiments under similar conditions showed unique identification occurred with an average of about 7 features. The model predicts that for a population of 4×106, only 14 feature-descriptions are required. These studies form a foundation for continuing research on real-time man-machine interaction for computer classification and identification of multidimensional vectors specified by noisy components.