A general framework for face detection

Abstract

In this paper a general framework for face detection is presented which taken into accounts both color and gray level images. For color images, skin color segmentation is used as the first stage to reduce search space into a few gray level regions possibly containing faces. And then in general for gray level images, techniques of template matching based on average face for searching face candidates and neural network classification for face verification are integrated for face detection. A qualitative 3D model of skin color in HSI space is used for skin color segmentation. Two types of templates: eyes-in-whole and face itself, are used one by one in template matching for searching face candidates. Two three-layer-perceptrons (MLPs) are used independently in the template matching procedure to verify each face candidate to produce two list of detected faces which are arbitrated to exclude most of the false alarms. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. © 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.