Face detection and facial feature localization without considering the appearance of image context

Face and facial feature detection plays an important role in various applications such as human computer interaction, video surveillance, face tracking, and face recognition. Efficient face and facial feature detection algorithms are required for applying to those tasks. This paper presents the algorithms for all types of face images in the presence of several image conditions. There are two main stages. In the first stage, the faces are detected from an original image by using Canny edge detection and our proposed average face templates. Second, a proposed neural visual model (NVM) is used to recognize all possibilities of facial feature positions. Input parameters are obtained from the positions of facial features and the face characteristics that are low sensitive to intensity change. Finally, to improve the results, image dilation is applied for removing some irrelevant regions. Additionally, the algorithms can be extended to rotational invariance problem by using Radon transformation to extract the main angle of the face. With more than 1000 images, the algorithms are successfully tested with various types of faces affected by intensity, occlusion, structural components, facial expression, illumination, noise, and orientation. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.