Effective detector and Kalman filter based robust face tracking system

We present a robust face tracking system from the sequence of video images based on effective detector and Kalman filter. To construct the effective face detector, we extract the face features using the five types of simple Haar-like features. Extracted features are reinterpreted using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and interpreted principal components are used for Support Vector Machine (SVM) that classifies the faces and non-faces. We trace the moving face with Kalman filter, which uses the static information of the detected faces and the dynamic information of changes between previous and current frames. To make a real-time tracking system, we reduce processing time by adjusting the frequency of face detection. In this experiment, the proposed system showed an average tracking rate of 95.5% and processed at 15 frames per second. This means the system is robust enough to track faces in real-time.