Spatial Content and Spatial Quantisation Effects in Face Recognition

It has recently become apparent that if face images are degraded by spatial quantisation, or block averaging, there is a nonlinear acceleration of the decline in accuracy of recognition as block size increases. This suggests recognition requires a critical minimum range of object spatial frequencies. Two experiments were performed to clarify the phenomenon. In experiment 1, the speed and accuracy of recognition for six frontoparallel photographs of faces were measured. After familiarisation training sessions, the images were shown for 100 ms with 11, 21, and 42 pixels per face, horizontally measured. Transformations calculated to remove the same range of spatial frequencies were performed by means of quantisation, a Fourier low-pass filter, and Gaussian blurring. Although accuracy declined and speed increased in a significant, nonlinear manner in all cases as the image quality was reduced, it did so at a faster rate for the quantised images. In experiment 2, faces rated as being typical were shown at 9, 12, 23, and 45 pixels per face and with appropriate Fourier low-pass versions. The nonlinear decline was confirmed and it was shown that it could not be attributed to a ceiling effect. A further condition allowed quantised and Fourier low-pass conditions to be compared with an unstructured-noise condition of equal strength to that of the quantised images. These gave comparable, but slightly less impaired, recognition than the quantised images. It can be inferred from these results that the removal of a critical range of at least 8–16 cycles per face of information explains the step decline in recognition seen with quantised images. However, the decline found with quantised images is reinforced by internal masking from pixelisation.