The focus of this dissertation is a methodology that enables computer systems to classify different up-front images of human faces as belonging to one of the individuals to which the system has been exposed previously. The images can present variance in size, location of the face, orientation, facial expressions, and overall illumination.; The approach to the problem taken in this dissertation can be classified as analytic as the shapes of individual features of human faces are examined separately, as opposed to holistic approaches to face recognition. The outline of the features is used to construct signature functions. These functions are then magnitude-, period-, and phase-normalized to form a translation-, size-, and rotation-invariant representation of the features. Vectors of a limited number of the Fourier decomposition coefficients of these functions are taken to form the feature vectors representing the features in the corresponding vector space. With this approach no computation is necessary to enforce the translational, size, and rotational invariance at the stage of recognition thus reducing the problem of recognition to the k-dimensional clustering problem.; A recognizer is specified that can reliably classify the vectors of the feature space into object classes. The recognizer made use of the following principle: a trial vector is classified into a class with the greatest number of closest vectors (in the sense of the Euclidean distance) among all vectors representing the same feature in the database of known individuals.; A system based on this methodology is implemented and tried on a set of 50 pictures of 10 individuals (5 pictures per individual). The recognition rate is comparable to that of most recent results in the area of face recognition.; The methodology presented in this dissertation is also applicable to any problem of pattern recognition where patterns can be represented as a collection of black shapes on the white background.
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