Real-Time Detection of Human Faces in Uncontrolled Environments

This paper presents an approach for the detection of human face and eyes in real time and in uncontrolled environments. The system has been implemented on a PC platform with the aid of simple commercial devices such as an NTSC video camera and a monochrome frame grabber. The approach is based on a probabilistic framework that uses a deformable template model to describe the human face. The system has been tested on both head-and-shoulder sequences as well as complex scenes with multiple people and random motion. The system is able to locate the eyes from different head poses (rotations in image plane as well as in depth). The information provided by the location of the eyes is used to extract faces with frontal pose from a video sequence. The extracted frontal frames can be passed to recognition and classification systems for further processing.