an elliptical facial image these various steps have been discussed by lu et al in u s patent application ser no 07 872 881 the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference once the entire set of facial images has been collected a set of stored facial images generated by the image processing algorithms 5 is subjected to an eigenface computational process which has been described in the literature by a m kirby and l sirovich 34 application of the karhuen loeve procedure for the characterization of the human face 34 transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence vol 12 no 1 1990 b m turk and a pentland 34 eigenfaces for recognition 34 loc cit c turk and pentland u s pat no 5 164 992 and d lu et al u s patent application ser no 07 572 881 this process results in the formation of a standard set of eigenfaces 8 this master set 8 shown in fig2 a and 2b is selected to span the entire range of faces or facial features respectively that are to subsequently to be recognized by a verification portion of the system it may be noted that increasing the number of eigenfaces in a set can.