Detection of facial characteristics based on edge information

In this paper, a novel method for eye and mouth detection and eye center and mouth corner localization, based on geometrical information is presented. First, a face detector is applied to detect the facial region, and the edge map of this region is extracted. A vector pointing to the closest edge pixel is then assigned to every pixel. x and y components of these vectors are used to detect the eyes and mouth. For eye center localization, intensity information is used, after removing unwanted effects, such as light reflections. For the detection of the mouth corners, the hue channel of the lip area is used. The proposed method can work efficiently on low-resolution images and has been tested on the XM2VTS database with very good results.