Detecting human faces in color images

Abstract

We propose a new method to detect human faces in color images. A human skin color model is built to capture the chromatic properties based on multivariate statistical analysis. Given a color image, multiscale segmentation is used to generate homogeneous regions at multiple different scales. From the coarsest to the finest scale, regions of skin color are merged until the shape is approximately elliptic. Postprocessing is performed to determine whether a merged region contains a human face and include the facial features of non-skin color such as eyes and mouth if necessary. Experimental results show that human faces in color images can be detected regardless of size, orientation and viewpoint.