9.2. Face Detection

Face detection is the first step in automated face recognition. Its reliability has a major influence on the performance and usability of the whole system. Given a single image or a video, an ideal face detection system should be able to identify and locate all faces regardless of their positions, scales, orientations, lighting conditions, expressions, and so on.

Face detection can be performed based on several different cues: skin color (for faces in color images), motion (for faces in videos), facial/head shape, and facial appearance, or a combination of them. Prior knowledge about them can be embedded into the system by learning from training data.

Appearance- and learning-based approaches have so far been the most effective ...

Get Emerging Topics in Computer Vision now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.