Identification of human faces

When trying to design artificial systems which may supplement or replace some task of human vision, it is often instructive to examine the features of human vision itself. The article outlines some of the things known about human face perception and recognition which helps one to understand how the human brain achieves the miraculous feats of face perception that it does. It outlines some perceptual illusions involving faces, and demonstrates what these tells about how the brain processes faces. It then describes how the important information which forms the basis for internal representations of faces appears to be based upon rather precise patterns of light and dark. Faces appear quite different if these patterns are altered in some way. These observations are important when we turn to the question of how we match different images of faces for identity. It also describes some of the work on the identification of images of faces in security video images, and considers the requirements for image engineering to help in this difficult area.