Overview

Alice J. O'Toole

School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas

Human face "processing" skills can make simultaneous use of a variety of information from the face, including information about the age, sex, race, identity, and even current mood of the person. We are further able to track facial motions that alter the configuration of features, making it difficult to encode the structure of the face. Facial movements include the gestures we make when we speak, changes in our gaze direction or head pose, and expressions such as smiling and frowning. These movements play an important role in human social interactions and in the survival mechanisms that protect us from danger; they also indicate the presence of a potential mate and direct our attention to an object or event of importance in our environment.

We are capable of these impressive feats of visual information processing even when viewing conditions are variable or less than optimal for example, when the face is poorly illuminated, viewed from an unusual vantage point or viewed from a distance so the resolution of the image on the retina is limited. These viewing parameters have proven challenging for computational models of face recognition.

Given the evolutionary importance of accurate, speedy recognition of human faces and recognition of the social information conveyed by expressions and movements, it is perhaps not surprising that the neural processing of faces has been studied intensively in recent decades. What is known to date indicates that several areas of...