A Novel Face Segmentation Algorithm from a Video Sequence for Real-Time Face Recognition

The first step in an automatic face recognition system is to localize the face region in a cluttered background and carefully segment the face from each frame of a video sequence. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient algorithm for segmenting a face suitable for recognition from a video sequence. The cluttered background is first subtracted from each frame, in the foreground regions, a coarse face region is found using skin colour. Then using a dynamic template matching approach the face is efficiently segmented. The proposed algorithm is fast and suitable for real-time video sequence. The algorithm is invariant to large scale and pose variation. The segmented face is then handed over to a recognition algorithm based on principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. The online face detection, segmentation, and recognition algorithms take an average of 0.06 second on a 3.2GHz P4 machine.