The current literature on face recognition contains thousands of references, most dating from the last few years. For an exhaustive survey of face analysis techniques the reader is referred to Chellappa et al. [4], and for current research the reader is referred to the IEEE Conferences on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Research on face recognition goes back to the earliest days of AI and computer vision. Rather than attempting to produce an exhaustive historical account, our focus will be on the early efforts that had the greatest impact on the community (as measured by, e.g., citations), and those few current systems that are in wide-spread use or have received extensive testing.