Preprocessing images of faces: correlations with human perceptions of distinctiveness and familiarity

The aim of the paper work is to further our understanding of how humans process and recognise faces. The authors do this by proceeding in parallel with testing subjects and building computer models. If a model reflects the way that humans process face images, it ought to fail (in the same way) to find the same faces easy or difficult. One characteristic of human recognition is that of distinctiveness: some faces are never forgotten, others easily lost in a crowd. The present paper describes the use of various forms of image processing to see whether they correlate with human perceptions of distinctiveness, memorability and familiarity