Fast face detection based on skin color segmentation using single chrominance Cr

Abstract

In this paper, a simple and fast algorithm was proposed to detect face. Firstly, some interest points marking skin regions were searched by only using simple chrominance Cr information instead of simultaneously using chrominance Cr and Cb. And then, a conventional and popular AdaBoost algorithm was employed to make a decision whether around the detected interest points was there face and then located the face if there was. 400 face patches were translated into YCbCr space, and it was found from the 400 face patches that skin Cr histogram overlapped a little with non-skin Cr histogram and its cut-off was about 137. From LFW database, another 215 facial images of 108 subjects were random selected to test the proposed method. Compared with other interest detection methods, the detection based simple Cr method can not only find out all face regions, but also the number of its detected interest points was the least and the whole detection time was the least too. Therefore, the proposed method was an effective face detection method.