Stable face representations

Photographs are often used to establish the identity of an individual or to verify that they are who they claim to be. Yet, recent research shows that it is surprisingly difficult to match a photo to a face. Neither humans nor machines can perform this task reliably. Although human perceivers are go...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 2011-06, Vol.366 (1571), p.1671-1683
Main Authors:	Jenkins, Rob, Burton, A. Mike
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Arithmetic mean Biometrics Eyewitness testimony Face Face Perception Face Recognition Facial Expression Facial recognition systems Familiarity Form Perception Humans Identification Identity Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted Memory Models, Theoretical Pattern Recognition, Automated Pattern Recognition, Visual Photography Psychological research Recognition, Psychology Security
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Summary:	Photographs are often used to establish the identity of an individual or to verify that they are who they claim to be. Yet, recent research shows that it is surprisingly difficult to match a photo to a face. Neither humans nor machines can perform this task reliably. Although human perceivers are good at matching familiar faces, performance with unfamiliar faces is strikingly poor. The situation is no better for automatic face recognition systems. In practical settings, automatic systems have been consistently disappointing. In this review, we suggest that failure to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar face processing has led to unrealistic expectations about face identification in applied settings. We also argue that a photograph is not necessarily a reliable indicator of facial appearance, and develop our proposal that summary statistics can provide more stable face representations. In particular, we show that image averaging stabilizes facial appearance by diluting aspects of the image that vary between snapshots of the same person. We review evidence that the resulting images can outperform photographs in both behavioural experiments and computer simulations, and outline promising directions for future research.
ISSN:	0962-8436 1471-2970