There was a piece, I _think_ in Scientific American, tho it might have been an AI journal, on face recognition by use of neural nets together with what were called "eigenface" images: These eigenfaces each have specific characteristics, which when combined together can closely approximate a specific face image. The target face was analyzed in terms of closeness-of-match to a small set of eigenfaces, on the order of 5 to 8, I think. Results of course were promising (else why write about it, eh?) if not excellent. At 12:14 PM 4/11/96 -0700, you wrote:

At 10:02 PM 4/10/96 -0700, you wrote:

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On computer face recognition:

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Shaving probably will not be a problem, but holding your head at a slightly different angle... will screw up the system totally, unless the system has radically improved since the last time I read up on it.

At 11:45 AM 4/9/96 -0500, K00l Secrets wrote:

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Well, the systems I have seen are quite good at finding people's eyes. Scaling (for distance), and rotation (for the angle of your head) therefore don't really confuse the system once it has your eyes.

Finding the eyes can only control for rotations in the plane of the image, when you tilt your head to one side. They cannot handle the much more common case of 3D rotations, where you look slightly to the right or slightly to the left of camera. Facial expressions also throw them badly.

Take a peak at http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/lawrence/papers. One of Lawences papers is on using Neural networks to recognize faces. Methinks that the state of the art is advancing rapidly and such problems as not looking at the camera or changing your expression are rapidly being overcome.

===================================== dwl@hnc.com

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