Humans have an extraordinary ability to recognise faces and can do so despite changes in viewing angle, lighting, age and hairstyle. This should make human operators very successful at detecting the fraudulent use of photo-id and -credit cards, at recognising the perpetrator of a crime and at matching the face of a suspect to video surveillance footage.
However, psychological research has shown that we tend to make very inaccurate eyewitnesses and, more surprisingly, cannot even perform the simple matching tasks involved with checking photo-cards and identifying suspects from CCTV footage. This has led to the conclusion that we are good at processing 'familiar' faces and poor at processing 'unfamiliar' faces.
The current talk looks at the results of research that has examined face identification in a forensic setting and compares the ability of human operators to the specifications set-down for computerised systems.