Facial Recognition

Last week we talked about how people recognise objects and really how well people recognise objects, given how difficult the problem is, given how objects can be seen in all different sorts of illumination, in different positions, in different angles. And yet we are able to extract that information, we are able to take the visual stuff out there, interpret it in a way that allows us to recognise all the different things that we can in our environment. Today we're going to kind of carry on looking at that, but we're gonna look at what's really a special class of objects. That's the human face. So we're going to look at how we recognise human faces and how we do it quite as well as we do. We're really experts at recognising faces. So again we can think about how we take that visual information and how we transform it into a form which allows us to put a name to a face, and to do all the other clever things that we can do with faces. So I'm gonna start off again by just pointing out that it's a hard problem. Face recognition is a hard problem, and it's a clever thing we do. If you think about all the different types of faces you can recognise, and all the different types of information you can get from the face, you kind of start to appreciate how well we can do face recognition.