Chapter 1
Introduction

Computer vision is a wide research field that aims at creating machines that see, not in the limited acception that they are able to sense the world by optical means, but in the more general acception that they are able to understand its perceivable structure. Template matching techniques, as now available, have proven to be a very useful tool for this intelligent perception process and have led machines to super human performance in recognition tasks such as face recognition. This introductory chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book, where template matching techniques for monochromatic images are discussed and applied to face analysis tasks.

keywords: computer vision, template matching, face recognition.