Our recognition of familiar faces is excellent, and generalises across viewing conditions. However, unfamiliar face recognition is much poorer. For this reason, automatic face recognition systems might benefit from incorporating the advantages of familiarity. Here we put this to the test using the face verification system available on a popular smartphone (the Samsung Galaxy). In two experiment...

The Synface project is developing a synthetic talking face to aid the hearing-impaired in telephone conversation. This report investigates the gain in intelligibility from the synthetic talking head when controlled by hand-annotated speech in both 12 normal hearing (NH) and 13 hearing-impaired (HI) listeners (average hearing loss 86 dB). For NH listeners, audio from everyday sentences was degra...

Face aftereffects for upright faces have been widely assumed to derive from face space and to provide useful information about its properties. Yet remarkably similar aftereffects have consistently been reported for inverted faces, a problematic finding because other paradigms argue that inverted faces are processed by different mechanisms from upright faces. Here, we identify a qualitative diff...

We examined developmental changes in the influence of averageness on judgments of facial attractiveness by showing adults and children pairs of individual faces in which one face was transformed 50% toward its group average, whereas the other face was transformed 50% away from that average. In one comparison, adults and 5-year-olds rated the more average faces as more attractive whether the fac...

Adults rate average faces as more attractive than most of the faces used in the creation of the average. One explanation for this is that average faces appear as both more familiar and more attractive because they resemble internal face prototypes formed from experience. Here we evaluated that explanation by examining the influence of recent experience on participants' subsequent judgments of a...

The ability to recognize an unfamiliar individual on the basis of prior exposure to a photograph is notoriously poor and prone to errors, but recognition accuracy is improved when multiple photographs are available. In applied situations, when only limited real images are available (e.g., from a mugshot or CCTV image), the generation of new images might provide a technological prosthesis for ot...

The first step in an automatic face recognition system is to localize the face region in a cluttered background and carefully segment the face from each frame of a video sequence. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient algorithm for segmenting a face suitable for recognition from a video sequence. The cluttered background is first subtracted from each frame, in the foreground regions, a...

Face detection has achieved great success using the region-based methods. In this report, we propose a region-based face detector applying deep networks in a fully convolutional fashion, named Face R-FCN. Based on Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks (R-FCN), our face detector is more accurate and computationally efficient compared with the previous R-CNN based face detectors. In our appro...