INTRODUCTION
• People have amazing ability to recognize and remember thousands of faces.
• Face is an important part of who you are and how people identify you.
• While humans have had the innate ability to recognize and distinguish faces for millions of years, computers are just catching up.
• Face recognition is a fascinating problem with important commercial applications such as mug shot matching, crowd surveillance & witness face reconstruction.
• In computer vision most of the popular face recognition algorithms have been biologically motivated.
• Using these models researchers can quantify the similarity between faces, images whose projections are close in face space are likely to be from the same individual.
• Compare results of these models with human perception to determine whether distance in face space corresponds to the human notion of facial similarity.
• Biometrics is used for that purpose.
FACE RECOGINITION SYSTEM
Human face recognition has drawn considerable attention from the researchers in recent years. An automatic face recognition system will find many applications in areas such as human-computer interfaces, model-based video coding and security control systems.
In addition, face recognition has the potential of being a non-intrusive form of biometric identification.
The difficulties of face recognition lie in the inherent variability arising from face characteristics (age, gender and race), geometry (distance and viewpoint), image quality (resolution, illumination, signal to noise ratio), and image content (background, occlusion and disguise). Because of such complexity, most face recognition systems to date assume a well-controlled environment and recognize only near frontal faces. However, these constraints need to be relaxed in practice
What is biometric?
A biometric is a unique, measurable characteristic of a human being that can be used to automatically recognize an individual or verify an individual