A real-time face tracker for color video

This paper presents a face localization and tracking algorithm which is based upon skin color detection and principle component analysis (PCA) based eye localization. Skin color segmentation is performed using statistical models for human skin color. The skin color segmentation task results in a mask marking the skin color regions in the actual frame, which is further used to compute the position and size of the dominant facial region utilizing a robust statistics-based localization method. To improve the results of skin color segmentation a foreground/background segmentation and an adaptive background update scheme were added. Additionally the derived face position is tracked with an Kalman filter. To overcome the problem of skin color ambiguity an eye detection algorithm based upon the principle component analysis (PCA) is presented.