Patent ID: 8160309

Claim:
A method of face recognition, the method comprising: generating a recognition database for at least one identified face by obtaining multiple images for each identified face, for each identified face, selecting a subset of distinctive features from a set of features, wherein the subset includes no more than half of the features of the set and wherein each of the distinctive features in the subset have at least one calculated value representative of that distinctive feature of the identified face that exceeds a threshold level of distinction from at least one corresponding calculated value for a reference set of faces, at least one calculated value comprises a mean value and a variance for that distinctive feature, and for each identified face, recording in the recognition database the selected subset of distinctive features, obtaining an image of an unidentified face for recognition; for at least one identified face in the recognition database, calculating a comparison metric comparing at least a portion of the selected subset of distinctive features of that identified face with corresponding features for the unidentified face; and using the comparison metric for each of the at least one identified faces to determine if there is a correlation between the unidentified face and at least one identified face of the recognition database.