Real-time face tracking

A real-time face tracker is presented in this paper. The system has achieved 15 frames/second tracking using a Pentium 200 PC with a Datacube MaxPCI image processing board and a Panasonic RGB color camera. It tracks human faces in the camera's field of view while people move freely. A stochastic model to characterize the skin color distribution of human skin is used to segment the face and other skin areas from the background. Median filtering is then used to clean up the background noise. Geometric constraints are applied to the segmented image to extract the face from the background.:To reduce computation and achieve real-time tracking, I dimensional projections(horizontal and vertical) of the image are analyzed instead of the 2 dimensional image. Run-length-encoding and frequency domain analysis algorithms are used to separate faces from other skin-like blobs. The system is robust to illumination intensity variations and different skin colors. It can be applied to many human-computer interaction applications such as sound locating, lip-reading, gaze tracking and face recognition.