Active face and feature tracking

Abstract

This paper describes a method for the detection and tracking of human face and facial features. Skin segmentation is learnt from samples of an image. After detecting a moving object, the corresponding area is searched for clusters of pixels with a known distribution. Since we only use the hue (color) component this process is quite insensitive to illumination changes. The face localization procedure looks for areas in the segmented area which resemble a head. Using simple heuristics, the located head is searched and its centroid is fed back to a camera motion control algorithm which tries to keep the face centered in the image using a pan-tilt camera unit. Furthermore the system is capable of tracking, in every frame, the three main features of a human face. Since precise eye location is computationally intensive, an eye and mouth locator using fast morphological and linear filters is developed. This allows for frame-by-frame checking, which reduces the probability of tracking a non-basis feature, yielding a higher success ratio. Velocity and robustness are the main advantages of this fast facial feature detector.