Using structured input patterns for neural based image recognition

Describe an application of neural networks to the recognition of faces. A parallel implementation of a learning algorithm is presented, and the authors discuss some critical aspects of face recognition and describes the goals of the system. The architecture of the system is presented; both the overall hierarchical structure and the function and structure of the different modules are described in some detail. Particular attention is paid to the concept of meta-neural net, that is the use of a neural net which `learns the behaviour of others neural nets, which is introduced for enhancing flexibility and efficiency of the system. Some experimental results are given, which show that the architecture shows a high generalization capability and allows the recognition of images with different kind of noise better than each single network can do. Finally a possible parallel implementation of the system with a preliminary evaluation of its performances is presented