How We Detect a Face: A Survey of Psychological Evidence

摘要

Scientists strive to build systems than can detect and recognize faces. One such system already exists: the human brain. How this system operates, however, is far from being fully understood. In this article, we review the psychological evidence regarding the process of face detection in particular. Evidence is collated from a variety of face-processing tasks including stimulus detection; face categorization, visual search, first saccade analysis, and face detection itself. Together, the evidence points towards a multistage-processing model of face detection. These stages involve preattentive processing, template fitting, and template evaluation. Comparisons are made with automatic face-detection systems.