Block Based Face Detection Scheme Using Face Color and Motion Information

In a sequence of images obtained by surveillance cameras, facial regions appear very small and their colors change abruptly by lighting condition. This paper proposes a new face detection scheme, robust on complex background, small size, and lighting conditions. The proposed method is consisted of three processes. In the first step, the candidates for the face regions are selected using face color distribution and motion information. In the second stage, the non-face regions are removed using face color ratio, boundary ratio, and average of column-wise intensity variation in the candidates. The face regions containing eyes and mouth are segmented and classified, and then they are scored using their topological relations in the last step. To speed up and improve a performance the above process, a block based image segmentation technique is used. The experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm detects faced regions with more than 91% of accuracy and less than 4.3% of false alarm rate.