What are the three main stages a face-recognition system runs through to identify a person?

Face detection (find the face), landmark detection (locate key points like eyes/nose/jaw), then recognition (identify, verify, or analyse attributes).

* The face-recognition pipeline — capture, extract, compare, match. *

Face recognition works by systematically analysing the visible features of the frontal head and turning them into a unique biometric profile:

1. Face finding (Gesichtsfindung): the system first locates faces in an image or video stream and crops the relevant region.
2. Reference-point detection (Referenzpunktdetektion): algorithms identify salient facial points — eyes, nose, mouth corners, jaw contour.
3. Recognition (Gesichtserkennung): the final analysis covers identification ("Who is this person?"), verification ("Is this person X?"), and attribute analysis (age, gender, emotion).

Tip: Identification is 1-to-many (search a database); verification is 1-to-1 (does this face match the claimed identity?). They sound similar but are very different problems.

Go deeper:

• Facial recognition system (Wikipedia) — the detect→align→extract→match pipeline.