Face recognition is a paramount functionality in a human's life. Many of our daily interactions depend on being able to recognize one's face. Humans can recognize faces even when the image is occluded (a person wearing sunglasses) or distorted (as in example of a caricature). This recognition task is performed effortlessly and in a split of a second. Understanding how humans recognize is a mind-boggling question for physicians, neural scientists, and computer scientists. Many researches think that the human brain has a region dedicated to face recognition solely. The attempt to model the brain's functionality by scientists has resulted in many face-recognition techniques. Unfortunately so far the techniques are extremely slow and give erroneous results compared to human's native recognition. Recognizing a face in any environment using the latest face recognition technology does not have the same chance of success as a human has. However, in a controlled environment the success rate increases.
It might be baffling to anybody why modeling or even understanding human face-recognition is so important. Besides the cognitive aspects, understanding the under laying mechanism could be used to build a computer system capable of recognizing not only human faces but also various other items. Such system could be used in surveillance systems, biomedical field (replacing a human faulty eye), military (recognizing terrorists by special forces), warehousing (robots capable of moving around without special markings on the floor), autonomous navigation of vehicles, system security (as a replacement for password authentication) and many more.