Robust Algorithm for Face Detection in Color Images

Abstract

Robust Algorithm is presented for frontal face detection in color images. Face detection is an important task in facial analysis systems in order to have a priori localized faces in a given image. Applications such as face tracking, facial expression recognition, gesture recognition, etc., for example, have a pre-requisite that a face is already located in the given image or the image sequence. Facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth are automatically detected based on properties of the associated image regions. On detecting a mouth, a nose and two eyes, a face verification step based on Eigen face theory is applied to a normalized search space in the image relative to the distance between the eye feature points. The experiments were carried out on test images taken from the internet and various other randomly selected sources. The algorithm has also been tested in practice with a webcam, giving (near) real-time performance and good extraction results.