For a normal human being it is extremely difficult to spot a familiar face in a crowd. It is a normal phenomenon and we all have the same experience when we try to do it. This phenomenon has been almost like an unsolved puzzle until now.

A recent study made sincere attempts to understand the implications of this phenomenon on people who are suffering through ‘face-recognition disorders’ and ailments that are related with visual-attention.

Findings of this research study have helped scientists helped in developing an understanding of an “artificial visual system that approaches the sophistication of human visual perception”.

This study has been published in the special issue of the “Journal of Vision”. ‘Crowding’ is a failure to recognize an individual object in a cluttered environment. Researchers say that it is mainly because of the one of the shortcuts that our brain use to help us create a “sense of the vast amount of visual information we take in every second”.

Another specific study attempts for explaining the effects of letter spacing on visual span and reading speed. According to this study there exists an established link between the reading speed and the number of letter that our eyes recognize without making a movement in the eyes. Researchers also examined the ratio of contrast and character sizes to the reading speed. More attempts must be made to identify the bottlenecks which are more sensory in nature and create difficulties in reading, say the scientists.

The researchers’ five different sets of with an objective of measuring the degree of familiarity and recognition of a familiar face or house located in a crowded display of other faces or houses. Researchers found that the face recognition is comparatively more difficult when target faces are surrounded by upright faces, as generally observed in crowds. The results were very different comparatively in the case of houses images. It was also different in the case of identification aiming the upside-down faces.

Results thus obtained have led the researchers believe that it is really difficult to search a face in the crowd simply because the face-images of all the upright faces in a crowd get intermixed and interfered with each other. Simple features crowding like the lines, slanted lines and edges can easily be documented but with faces it is never easy as they are a complex stimulus.

Many researchers believe that human brain contains special status for faces. This face image processing is different from the collection of lines and edges. Brain for many objects creates a holistically simple image.
Crowding is an important method that can be helpful in understanding the fundamental mechanisms of our visual system. Our visual system makes use of special mechanisms in order to consolidate or filter a great deal of information into a very few meaningful information blocks.

Dr. Whitney express that the future developments based on the human visual system model will certainly be beneficial. Vision scientists and engineers must therefore try to develop an efficient and realistic artificial visual system on this basis. “Understanding of the visual system’s heuristics, shortcuts and limitations such as crowding will likely prove essential in designing effective artificial vision”, said Dr Whitney.

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