User authentication with facial images. Human-friendly identification in the Internet

When conveying unlimited and uncertain information, the human face can be an expressive medium for human communication and human computer interfaces. We study the short-term capacity of the human brain for faces. A testee has a period of time to remember a set of face pictures, which will be replaced with newly chosen face pictures except one; he must try to identify the picture which remains in the new set. As more pictures are given, the chance to answer correctly decreases. The simple test has shown that the observed results are as confident as an unlikely happening event with a probability of 10/sup -6/ that it would not happen. With 91% confidence, a human remembers faces easier than numerical data. A formulation of capacity in terms of faces is left as a future study.