A new robust human authentication system, device, and instructions, embeddable in a physical and tangible computer readable medium, for determining if at least one test image obtained using an imaging device matches at least one training image in an enrollment database, are disclosed. This invention applies the concepts of appearance (PCA or PCA+LDA) and holistic anthropometrics that include head, face, neck, and shoulder linear and non-linear geometric measurements. The appearance (“eigen”) coefficients and holistic anthropometric measurements selected may be used as feature vectors. A boosting algorithm ranks features as “weak learners” and combines their outputs for “strong” recognition.