Face recognition using eigenfaces

Abstract
We present an approach to the detection and identification of human faces and describe a work- ing, near-real-time face recognition system which tracks a subject's head and then recognizes the per- son by comparing characteristics of the face to those of known individuals. Our approach treats face recognition as a two-dimensional recognition prob- lem, taking advantage of the fact that faces are are normally upright and thus may be described by a small set of 2-D characteristic views. Face images are projected onto a feature space ("face space") that best encodes the variation among known face images. The face space is defined by the "eigen- faces", which are the eigenvectors of the set of faces; they do not necessarily correspond to isolated fea- tures such as eyes, ears, and noses. The framework provides the ability to learn to recognize new faces in an unsupervised manner.

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