• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.1-11
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• 2006

Many research demonstrations and commercial applications have been tried to develop face detection and recognition systems. Human face detection plays an important role in applications such as access control and video surveillance, human computer interface, identity authentication, etc. There are some special problems such as a face connected with background, faces connected via the skin color, and a face divided into several small parts after skin region segmentation in generally. It can be allowed many face detection techniques to solve the first and second problems. However, it is not easy to detect a face divided into several parts of regions for reason of different illumination conditions in the third problem. Therefore, we propose an efficient modified skin segmentation algorithm to solve this problem because the typical region segmentation algorithm can not be used to. Our algorithm detects skin regions over the entire image, and then generates face candidate regions using our skin segmentation algorithm For each face candidate, we implement the procedure of region merging for divided regions in order to make a region using adjacency between homogeneous regions. We utilize various different searching window sizes to detect different size faces and a face detection classifier based on a back-propagation algorithm in order to verify whether the searching window contains a face or not.