Recognising face features and faces

In order to develop a successful face-recognition system, it is necessary to remove instance-specific detail from an incoming image, before attempting to match against previously stored codes. Very recently hybrid methods have emerged, which make use of known feature locations either implicitly, or explicitly to provide much better input to a recognition component which has many of the characteristics of a net based method. The author describes one such hybrid scheme, presenting details of a working system for locating face features; and a coding scheme, based on accurate feature location, which is useful for recognition. The author describes some applications. An advantage of feature recognition over net-based methods is the detailed understanding available at an intermediate stage; this can sometimes be valuable in its own right