Man-machine interaction in human-face identification

How well can a computer identify a human face which is described by a person who is inspecting a photograph? We give an account of an interactive system that takes advantage both of the human's superiority in detecting and describing noteworthy features and of the machine's superiority in making decisions based on accurate knowledge of population statistics of stored face-features. Experiments using a population of 255 faces and 10 or fewer feature-descriptions showed that the population containing the described individual could be narrowed down to less than 4 percent in 99 percent of all trials.