How well do you know Tom Hanks?: using a game to learn about face recognition.

Human face recognition abilities vastly outperform computer-vision algorithms working on comparable tasks, especially in the case of poor lighting, bad image quality, or partially hidden faces. In this paper, we describe a novel game with a purpose in which players must guess the name of a celebrity whose face appears blurred. The game combines a successful casual game paradigm with meaningful applications in both human- and computer-vision science. Preliminary user studies were conducted with 28 users and more than 7,000 game rounds. The results supported and extended pre-existing knowledge and hypotheses from controlled scientific experiments, which show that humans are remarkably good at recognizing famous faces, even with a significant degree of blurring. Our results will be further incorporated into research in human vision as well as machine-learning and computer-vision algorithms for face recognition.