Robust and efficient multipose face detection using skin color segmentation

In this paper we describe an efficient technique for detecting faces in arbitrary images and video sequences. The approach is based on segmentation of images or video frames into skin-colored blobs using a pixel-based heuristic. Scale and translation invariant features are then computed from these segmented blobs which are used to perform statistical discrimination between face and non-face classes. We train and evaluate our method on a standard, publicly available database of face images and analyze its performance over a range of statistical pattern classifiers. The generalization of our approach is illustrated by testing on an independent sequence of frames containing many faces and non-faces. These experiments indicate that our proposed approach obtains false positive rates comparable to more complex, state-of-the-art techniques, and that it generalizes better to new data. Furthermore, the use of skin blobs and invariant features requires fewer training samples since significantly fewer non-face candidate regions must be considered when compared to AdaBoost-based approaches.