While I first encountered facial recognition companies such as Viisage and Visionics (both now part of IDEMIA) in the late 1990s, the first attempts at computerized facial recognition were launched decades earlier. A Mobbeel LinkedIn article provides the history of how Woody Bledsoe pioneered facial recognition.
“Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe, a mathematician working in the 1960s, created a prototype using RAND tablets that made it possible to digitise facial features through electromagnetic coordinates. The system compared new images against a pre-existing database, laying the foundations for modern facial biometrics.
“Between 1964 and 1966, at Panoramic Research in Palo Alto, the project was completed by Helen Chan Wolf and Charles Bisson, co-authors of the technical report “A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System, Some Preliminary Results” (1965). The system was semi-automated: a person manually marked points such as the centre of the pupils or the corners of the eyes on a graphics tablet, at a rate of around 40 photographs per hour, and the computer calculated 20 normalised facial distances to compensate for head rotation, tilt and size. In subsequent tests involving more than 2,000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed human operators.”
For more details about this early work, and subsequent work on Eigenfaces in the 1990s, read the article.
For more on “Woody” Bledsoe, see this article in the History of Information.
“From 1964 to 1966 Woodrow W. Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson of Panoramic Research, Palo Alto, California, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database.”
