Locating facial region of a head-and-shoulders color image

This paper addresses our proposed method to automatically locate the person's face from a given image that consists of a head-and-shoulders view of the person and a complex background scene. The method involves a fast, simple and yet robust algorithm that exploits the spatial distribution characteristics of human skin color. It first uses the chrominance component of the input image to detect pixels with skin color appearance. Then, based on the spatial distribution of the detected skin-color pixels and their corresponding luminance values, the algorithm employs some regularization processes to reinforce regions of skin-color pixels that are more likely to belong to the facial regions and eliminate those that are not. The performance of the face localization algorithm is illustrated by some simulation results carried out on various head-and-shoulders test images.