Woonggi Kim, Junchul Chun, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 117-124, Dec. 2013
10.7472/jksii.2013.14.6.117, Full Text:  HTML
Keywords: Face Detection, Skin Color, Haar-like feature, Adaboost, optical flow, Template matching, Face pose estimation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new method which efficiently estimates a face direction from a sequences of input video images in real time fashion. For this work, the proposed method performs detecting the facial region and major facial features such as both eyes, nose and mouth by using the Haar-like feature, which is relatively not sensitive against light variation, from the detected facial area. Then, it becomes able to track the feature points from every frame using optical flow in real time fashion, and determine the direction of the face based on the feature points tracked. Further, in order to prevent the erroneously recognizing the false positions of the facial features when if the coordinates of the features are lost during the tracking by using optical flow, the proposed method determines the validity of locations of the facial features using the template matching of detected facial features in real time. Depending on the correlation rate of re-considering the detection of the features by the template matching, the face direction estimation process is divided into detecting the facial features again or tracking features while determining the direction of the face. The template matching initially saves the location information of 4 facial features such as the left and right eye, the end of nose and mouse in facial feature detection phase and reevaluated these information when the similarity measure between the stored information and the traced facial information by optical flow is exceed a certain level of threshold by detecting the new facial features from the input image. The proposed approach automatically combines the phase of detecting facial features and the phase of tracking features reciprocally and enables to estimate face pose stably in a real-time fashion. From the experiment, we can prove that the proposed method efficiently estimates face direction.

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