Detection of Facial Direction for Automatic Image Arrangement

이미지 자동배치를 위한 얼굴 방향성 검출

With the development of multimedia and optical technologies, application systems with facial features hare been increased the interests of researchers, recently. The previous research efforts in face processing mainly use the frontal images in order to recognize human face visually and to extract the facial expression. However, applications, such as image database systems which support queries based on the facial direction and image arrangement systems which place facial images automatically on digital albums, deal with the directional characteristics of a face. In this paper, we propose a method to detect facial directions by using facial features. In the proposed method, the facial trapezoid is defined by detecting points for eyes and a lower lip. Then, the facial direction formula, which calculates the right and left facial direction, is defined by the statistical data about the ratio of the right and left area in facial trapezoids. The proposed method can give an accurate estimate of horizontal rotation of a face within an error tolerance of $\pm1.31$ degree and takes an average execution time of 3.16 sec.