This paper describes briefly an algorithm both for real-time facial image recognition in unconstrained indoor environments and a human like agent image synthesis which responds to the recognition results. Our simple but effective image recognition algorithm can recognize facial images from moving images, choose one primal face and track the primal face in real-time. Therefore, the agent can gaze/glance/etc., at the primal face (the interacting user) during the process. It means a "facial contact" or an "eye contact" can be achieved between the user and the synthesized moving agent, which is very important for friendly human interfaces.

A direct character-string retrieval method based on human search characteristics is proposed for Japanese textual image processing. In an experiment in which human subjects were to identify characters shown on a CRT screen, character-string search performance was better than single-character search performance in Japanese sentence contexts. This result suggests that character strings contain more information than characters alone. The analysis of reaction times shows that there are two stages in visual search. A character-string image retrieval system which, human-like, has two stages is effective in searching target images in ninety Japanese textual images. Moreover, human-like performance is obtained from the system: for example, it more easily identifies character-string images than single-character images.>