Detection of human faces using skin color and eyes

Abstract

We propose an effective and robust automatic face detection method which can locate the faces in natural scene images. The method can be used as a preprocessor of a face recognition system. Several approaches that use the human skin color in the images have been proposed for detecting human faces. They cannot adequately cope with the problem such as false positives, the human skin color of other body parts and face orientation. We use two natural and powerful factors, the skin color and the eyes. This method takes two steps in order to extract regions of the human skin color and the eyes in the images. In the first step of the processing, regions of the human skin color are extracted and those regions are converted into gray scale from the original image. The skin color is a fast and robust cue that can be used as the first step in a face detection. In the next step, the eyes are extracted from candidate regions by calculating central moments and by using geometrical relationships between the eyes. The position and angles between the eyes can determine the exact location of a face. Experimental results using the proposed method show that human faces can be detected in color images regardless of size, expression, lighting conditions and orientation.