How Well Do You Know Tom Hanks? Using a Game to Learn About Face Recognition

Oge Marques, Justyn Snyder and Mathias Lux

Human face recognition abilities vastly outperform computer-vision algorithms working on comparable tasks, especially in the case of poor lighting, bad image quality, or partially hidden faces. In this paper, we describe a novel game with a purpose in which players must guess the name of a celebrity whose face appears blurred. The game combines a successful casual game
paradigm with meaningful applications in both humanand computer-vision science. Preliminary user studies were conducted with 28 users and more than 7,000 game rounds. The results supported and extended preexisting knowledge and hypotheses from controlled scientific experiments, which show that humans are remarkably good at recognizing famous faces, even
with a significant degree of blurring. Our results will be further incorporated into research in human vision as well as machine-learning and computer-vision algorithms for face recognition.

http://faculty.eng.fau.edu/omarques/files/2013/02/Marques_Snyder_Lux_CHI2013.pdf