An effective approach to chin contour extraction

Abstract

In front-view facial images, chin contour is a relative stable shape feature and can be widely used in face recognition. But it is hard to extract by conventional edge-detection methods due to the complexities of grayscale distribution in chin area. This paper presents an effective approach to chin contour extraction using the facial parts distributing rules and approved snake model. We first approximately localize a parabola as the initial contour according to prior statistical knowledge, then use approved active contour model to find the real chin contour through iteration. Experimental results show that by this algorithm we can extract the precise chin contour which preserves lots of details for face recognition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.