Extracting eyebrow contour and chin contour for face recognition

This paper proposes a novel method for extraction of eyebrow contour and chin contour. We first segment rough eyebrow regions using spatial constrained sub-area K-means clustering. Then eyebrow contours are extracted by Snake method with effective image force. For chin contour extraction, we first estimate several possible chin locations which are used to build a number of curves as chin contour candidates. Based on the chin like edges extracted by proposed chin edge detector, the curve with the largest likeliness to be the actual chin contour is selected. Finally, the credible extracted eyebrow contour and the estimated chin contours are used as geometric features for face recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can extract eyebrow contours and chin contours with good accuracy and the extracted features are effective for improving face recognition rates. 2007 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.