Estimation of eye and mouth corner point positions in a knowledge–based coding system

Automatic extraction of facial feature points is one of the main problems for semantic coding of videophone sequences at very low bit rates. In this contribution, an approach for estimation of the eye and mouth corner point positions is presented. For this proposition, the location informations of the face model are exploited to define search areas for estimation of the eye and mouth corner point positions. Then, the eye and mouth corner point positions are estimated based on a template matching technique with eye and mouth corner templates. Finally, in order to verify these estimated corner point positions, some geometric conditions between the corner point positions and the center point positions of the eyes and the mouth are exploited. The proposed algorithm has been applied to test sequences Claire and Miss America with a spatial resolution corresponding to CIF and a frame rate of 10 Hz.