During 1964 and 1965, Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Bledsoe, working with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson at Panoramic Research, Inc. in Palo Alto, built what is generally regarded as the first computer system for recognizing human faces. The University of Texas memorial resolution for Bledsoe records that “he was proud of this work, but because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency that did not allow much publicity, little of the work was published.” Panoramic Research, which Bledsoe co-founded in 1960, did most of its work on contracts from the US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies.
The problem, as Bledsoe framed it, was: given a large database of images - “in effect, a book of mug shots” - and a new photograph, select from the database a small set of records such that one of them matched the photograph. He noted the difficulty directly: “This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc.”
The system was labeled “man-machine” because a human did part of the work. Using a RAND tablet or GRAFACON, an operator extracted the coordinates of features such as the center of the pupils and the corners of the eyes, from which the program computed a list of about 20 distances (width of mouth, pupil-to-pupil distance, and so on). Operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. Because no two photographs share the same head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale, the program normalized each set of distances to a frontal orientation using a standard head model derived from measurements of seven heads.
After Bledsoe left Panoramic in 1966, the work continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily under Peter Hart. In experiments on a database of over 2,000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans at the same recognition tasks. Hart later recalled the project simply: “It really worked!” Bledsoe went on to lead the field of automated theorem proving and to serve as president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.