Picture processing by computer has found its application in various fields. Character recognition has shown the most practical success. Furthermore, the techniques span much more sophisticated applications such as interpretation of biomedical images and X-ray films, measurement of images in nuclear physics, processing of a large volume of pictorial data sent from the satellites, etc. The particular problem attacked in this thesis is computer analysis and identification of human faces. Pictures of human faces are successfully analyzed by a computer program which extracts face feature points, such as nose, mouth, eyes, and so on. The program was tested with more than 800 photographs The research has been done with main emphasis on the method of how to incorporate the picture structures into the picture anlysis program. The success of the program is due to the employment of a flexible picture analysis scheme with feedbacks, which will be described in the next chapter. An experiment on face identification of 20 people was also conducted. I-1. Picture Analysis and Recognition- New Aspects When shown the pictures of the human face of Fig. 1-1, we can immediately tell the positions of the nose, mouth and eyes; and more- over, we can say that both pictures surely portray the same person. Picture analysis and recognition by computer concerns itself with this type of two-dimensional image processing. In this thesis, I selected human-face pictures as objects of processing.

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyzing image sequences, or video understanding. Video understanding deals with understanding of video sequences, e. g. , recognition of gestures, activities, facial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvious overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to gener ate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Researchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to gen erate the synthetic imagery. A good example of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is de rived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analysis followed by synthesis.

Although the history of computer-aided face recognition stretches back to the 1960s, automatic face recognition remains an unsolved problem and still offers a great challenge to computer-vision and pattern recognition researchers. This handbook is a comprehensive account of face recognition research and technology, written by a group of leading international researchers. Twelve chapters cover all the sub-areas and major components for designing operational face recognition systems. Background, modern techniques, recent results, and challenges and future directions are considered. The book is aimed at practitioners and professionals planning to work in face recognition or wanting to become familiar with the state-of- the-art technology. A comprehensive handbook, by leading research authorities, on the concepts, methods, and algorithms for automated face detection and recognition. Essential reference resource for researchers and professionals in biometric security, computer vision, and video image analysis.

Face recognition has been actively studied over the past decade and continues to be a big research challenge. Just recently, researchers have begun to investigate face recognition under unconstrained conditions. Unconstrained Face Recognition provides a comprehensive review of this biometric, especially face recognition from video, assembling a collection of novel approaches that are able to recognize human faces under various unconstrained situations. The underlying basis of these approaches is that, unlike conventional face recognition algorithms, they exploit the inherent characteristics of the unconstrained situation and thus improve the recognition performance when compared with conventional algorithms. Unconstrained Face Recognition is structured to meet the needs of a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Brain, Vision and Artificial Intelligence, BVAI 2007. Coverage includes: basic models in visual sciences, cortical mechanism of vision, color processing in natural vision, action oriented vision, visual recognition and attentive modulation, biometric recognition, image segmentation and recognition, disparity calculation and noise analysis, meaning-interaction-emotion, and robot navigation.

This book aims to bring together selected recent advances, applications and original results in the area of biometric face recognition. They can be useful for researchers, engineers, graduate and postgraduate students, experts in this area and hopefully also for people interested generally in computer science, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Various methods, approaches and algorithms for recognition of human faces are used by authors of the chapters of this book, e.g. PCA, LDA, artificial neural networks, wavelets, curvelets, kernel methods, Gabor filters, active appearance models, 2D and 3D representations, optical correlation, hidden Markov models and others. Also a broad range of problems is covered: feature extraction and dimensionality reduction (chapters 1-4), 2D face recognition from the point of view of full system proposal (chapters 5-10), illumination and pose problems (chapters 11-13), eye movement (chapter 14), 3D face recognition (chapters 15-19) and hardware issues (chapters 19-20).