A Random Walk through Eigenspace

It has been over a decade since the “Eigenfaces” approach to automatic face recognition, and other appearancebased methods, made an impression on the computer vision research community and helped spur interest in vision systems being used to support biometrics and human-computer interface. In this paper I give a personal view of the original motivation for the work, some of the strengths and limitation of the approach, and progress in the years since. Appearance-based approaches to recognition complement featureor shape-based approaches, and a practical face recognition system should have elements of both. Eigenfaces is not a general approach to recognition, but rather one tool out of many to be applied and evaluated in the appropriate context. key words: face recognition, eigenfaces, computer vision