A High Performance Dual Stage Face Detection Algorithm Implementation using FPGA Chip and DSP Processor

Abstract

A dual stage system architecture for face detection based on skin tone detection and Viola and Jones face detection structure is presented in this paper. The proposed architecture able to track down human faces in the image with high accuracy within time constrain. A non-linear transformation technique is introduced in the first stage to reduce the false alarms in second stage. Moreover, in the second stage pipe line technique is used to improve overall throughput of the system. The proposed system design is based on Xil¬inx’s Virtex FPGA chip and Texas Instruments DSP processor. The dual port BRAM memory in FPGA chip and EMIF (External Memory Interface) of DSP processor are used as interface between FPGA and DSP processor. The proposed system exploits advantages of both the computational elements (FPGA and DSP) and the system level pipelining to achieve real time perform¬ance. The present system implementation focuses on high accurate and high speed face detec¬tion and this system evaluated using standard BAO image database, which include images with different poses, orientations, occlusions and illumination. The proposed system attained 16.53 FPS frame rate for the input image spatial resolution of 640X480, which is 23.4 times faster detection of faces compared to MATLAB implementation and 12.14 times faster than DSP implementation and 2.1 times faster than FPGA implementation.