Patent ID: 8199979

Claim:
A processor-based device operating according to digitally-embedded programming instructions and communicating with one or more digital data storage media for classifying and archiving images including face regions that are acquired with an image acquisition device, the programming instructions comprising: a face detection module for identifying a group of pixels corresponding to a face region that is rotated left or right or tilted up or down, or a combination thereof, within digital image data acquired by the image acquisition device; a normalization module for generating a normalized version of the face region that is neither rotated left or right nor tilted up or down, nor a combination thereof; a face recognition module for extracting a set of face classifier parameter values from said normalized version of the face region, said set of face classifier parameter values being collectively known as a faceprint associated with said normalized face region; and a workflow module for comparing said extracted faceprint to one or more extracted faceprints recently acquired by the same acquisition device and associated with a same identity, and for determining based on the comparing whether a new faceprint corresponds closely enough to one or more other faceprints to be used as a reference faceprint for said identity; and for storing, locally or in a remote database, or both, said reference faceprint in association with said identity, and wherein said determining by the workflow module comprises determining proximities of the values of the face classifier parameters of the new face print image with values corresponding to one or more archived fingerprints wherein the determining by the workflow module comprises automatically determining that the new faceprint corresponds to a known identity based on one or more geometric distance proximities being within a predetermined proximity threshold, and wherein the predetermined proximity threshold comprises a first threshold, and the determining by the workflow module comprises confirming whether the normalized face region associated with the new faceprint corresponds to a known identity when a geometric distance proximity is outside the first threshold and within a second threshold greater than the first threshold.