This review describes important advances that have been made during the past decade for genome-wide human promoter recognition. Interest in promoter recognition algorithms on a genome-wide scale is worldwide and touches on a number of practical systems that are important in analysis of gene regulation and in genome annotation without experimental support of ESTs, cDNAs or mRNAs. The main focus of this review is on feature extraction and model selection for accurate human promoter recognition, with descriptions of what they are, what has been accomplished, and what remains to be done.