Who are you?: A wearable face recognition system to support human memory

Have you ever experienced that you cannot remember the name of a person you meet again? To circumvent such an awkward situation, it would be great if you had had a system that tells you the name of the person in secret. In this paper, we propose a wearable system of real-time face recognition to support human memory. The contributions of our work are summarized as follows: (1) We discuss the design and implementation details of a wearable system capable of augmenting human memory by vision-based realtime face recognition. (2) We propose a 2 step recognition approach from coarse-to-fine grain to boost the execution time towards the social acceptable limit of 900 [ms]. (3) In experiments, we evaluate the computational time and recognition rate. As results, the proposed system could recognize a face in 238 ms with the the cumulative recognition rate at the 10th rank was 93.3 %. Computational time with the coarse-to-fine search was 668 ms less than that without coarse-to-fine search and the results showed that the proposed system has enough ability to recognize faces in real time.