Face detection for image annotation

Abstract

The problem of face detection in images – locating image areas corresponding to human faces – has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years due to numerous possible applications. In this paper, we describe a face detection system for an image annotation task that requires detection of faces at multiple scales against a complex background. The proposed system is a top-down system; it uses the presence of skin tone pixels coupled with shape and face-specific features to locate faces in images. The main distinguishing feature of the proposed system is its use of an iterative region partitioning procedure to generate candidate face regions. To date, the performance of the system has been tested with over 200 test images of varying complexity with promising results.