Human Face Recognition: State of the art and challenges

Abstract

Biometric recognition has attracted the attention of scientists, investors, government agencies as well as the media for the great potential in many application domains. Among the many developed techniques for biometric recognition, face analysis seems to be among the most promising and interesting modalities.

This lecture will focus on the current state of the art in face recognition technologies and its perspectives. The human visual system certainly provides a remarkable benchmark for face recognition, but also an inspiration for algorithmic design. The ability of the human visual system of analysing unknown faces and extracting useful personal information, even under different viewing conditions, is an example of the great potential of human face analysis.

Even though many off-the-shelf commercial systems and applications exist for face detection and recognition, there are still many open problems which need to be “faced” as well. This not only requires designing new algorithms but also to determine the real potential and limitations of existing techniques. This lecture will review several past and current methods for human face analysis, based on diverse computational frameworks and image representations, both in 2D and 3D.

Biography

Massimo Tistarelli received the Phd in Computer Science and Robotics in 1991 from the University of Genoa. He is Full Professor in Computer Science (with tenure) and director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Sassari, Italy. Since 1986 he has been involved as project coordinator and task manager in several projects on computer vision and biometrics funded by the European Community. Since 1994 he has been the director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Department of Communication, Computer and Systems Science of the University of Genoa, and now at the University of Sassari, leading several National and European projects on computer vision applications and image-based biometrics. He is a founding member of the Biosecure Foundation, which includes all major European research centers working in biometrics. His main research interests cover biological and artificial vision (particularly in the area of recognition, three-dimensional reconstruction and dynamic scene analysis), pattern recognition, biometrics, visual sensors, robotic navigation and visuo-motor coordination. He is coauthor of more than 150 scientific papers in peer reviewed books, conferences and international journals. He is the principal editor for the Springer book “Handbook of Remote Biometrics”, published in June 2009. Prof. Tistarelli is one of the world-recognized leading researchers in the area of biometrics, especially in the field of face recognition and multimodal fusion. Prof. Tistarelli is associate editor for the journals IEEE Transactions on PAMI, IET Biometrics, Image and Vision Computing and Pattern Recognition Letters. Since 2003 he is the founding director for the Int.l Summer School on Biometrics (now at the 16^th edition – http://biometrics.uniss.it). He is the Scientific Director of the Italian Platform for Biometric Technologies, Fellow member of IAPR and Senior member of IEEE.

Massimo Tistarelli
University of Sassari, Italy