(Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-695)

This thesis considers segmentation and identification of human

faces from grey scale images with clutter. The segmentation developed utilizes the elliptical structure of the human head. It uses the information present in the edge map of the image and thr ough some preprocessing separates the head from the background clutter. An ellipse is then fitted to mark the boundary between the head region and the background. The identification procedure finds feature points in the segmented face through a Gabor wave let decomposition and performs graph matching. The segmentation and identification algorithms were tested on a database of 48 images of 16 persons with encouraging results.