The design of face model for low resolution face images

The technology of face tracking plays an important role for improving the quality of security by surveillance camera and, archiving the smooth communications between human and robot. As one of the face tracking methods, Active Appearance Model (AAM) which is robust for object's rigid and non-rigid transformations has been proposed by T. F. Cootes et al. Although the method is appropriate for the larger face in an image, it is indicated that face tracking for the small face in an image is difficult. Therefore, in this paper, we present the Resolution-variable AAM. Resolutionvariable AAM is the novel model for small face fitting in the image which has been difficult to fit to. In the proposed method, we overcome the problem by introducing the structure of changing the resolution to AAM and, changing its resolution adaptively to the resolution of input image. From the simulation results, it was confirmed that the proposed method was rapid and useful for small face fitting. ©2013 The Institute of Engineers of Japan.