What's in a Face?

The answer to Picasso's question seems to have been unlocked by researchers at the University of Glasgow, according to a study released January 25 in the journal Science. A pair of researchers in the psychology department at Glasgow have developed a model for fast and accurate face recognition that may push computer aided systems for recognizing the human face into a reality.

"We were surprised by the level of success of our trials," lead researcher Dr. Rob Jenkins said in a press release from the University. "The applications of this technology are quite extensive, from the identification of missing persons to use in customs."

The research group looked at studies in psychology on how the human mind recognizes faces to develop its algorithm, which, when combined with existing techniques, improved accuracy from the industry standard of 54% to 100%. Their method, which they call image averaging, relies on the system having multiple known images of the subject, then "averaging" the results in much the same way the human mind does for a familiar face.

In order to test their system, celebrity images found on MyHeritage.com were scanned and identified, then a new picture of the same celebrity thrown at it, to see how well the system did. Over 30,000 celebrity images are stored at MyHeritage.com.

In developing their model of "face space," they removed artifacts caused by divergence in lighting, differences in how the image was captured by the camera, the subject's expression and variation in pose, and came up with 10 key points for actual face recognition.

"As humans we are amazingly good at recognizing people we know, but we are actually very bad at matching someone we don't know to their photo," said co-researcher Mark Burton. "In this project we have borrowed from psychological research on how we recognize familiar people, and discovered that this can substantially improve automatic face recognition too. This may offer a way forward for technology that has not yet lived up to its promise."

Apparently, private industry agrees with Professor Burton. Cognitec GmbH, Dresden, Germany has already incorporated the new technology into a trial version of their product FaceVACS® which is being tested in Sydney, Australia's airport.

Cognitec's FaceVACS® technology was incorporated and used in the study. FaceVACS® is used by various government and law enforcement agencies around the world for such applications as surveillance by the German Federal Criminal Police agency BKA, and access control by Merck and Volkswagen Bank.. Cognitec maintains offices in Dresden, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Miami, Florida.