And while we are very good at recognising familiar faces, we are worse than we think at identifying unfamiliar ones. Researchers presented people with two photographs and asked if they showed the same person. They found an error rate of around 20%.
With faces we don’t know, subtle differences such as lighting, expression, make-up or hair style can really hamper our recognition skills.
And how good are we at recognising faces compared with machines?
The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones says facial recognition software has been around for a long time but has not yet lived up to expectations. He says the more images you ask computers to process, the less accurate they tend to be. “There’s an extraordinary amount of variation in the images on which the computers are trained,” he says.
So who would win in a face recognition battle – humans or computers?
“It depends on the task,” says Rob Jenkins. “If it’s a human who knows the face they’re looking at, bet on the human every time. If it's a face that is unknown, there will be situations now where the machine has the edge.”
And Rob thinks that with technology changing so rapidly, it won’t be too long before we are outperformed entirely by machines.
Photo gallery: Listeners' pics of faces in odd places
Listen: The Curious Face Off
