Human Face Segmentation and Identification

Abstract

This thesis considers segmentation and identification of human faces from grey scale images with clutter. The segmentation developed utilizes the elliptical structure of the human head. It uses the information present in the edge map of the image and through some preprocessing separates the head from the background clutter. An ellipse is then fitted to mark the boundary between the head region and the background. The identification procedure finds feature points in the segmented face through a Gabor wavelet decomposition and performs graph matching. The segmentation and identification algorithms were tested on a database of 48 images of 16 persons with encouraging results. The support of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA Order No. 8459) and the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center under Contract DACA76-92-C-0009 is gratefully acknowledged, as is the help of Sandy German in preparing this paper. Dedication To my grandmother Masooda Begum and my parents Iftikhar A. Sir...