Human Face Detection and Tracking using Skin Color Modeling and Connected Component Operators

Face Recognition (FR) systems are increasingly gaining more importance. Face detection and tracking in a complex scene forms the first step in building a practical FR system. In this paper, a method to detect and track human faces in color image sequences is described. Skin color classification and morphological segmentation is used to detect face(s) in the first frame. These detected faces are tracked over subsequent frames by using the position of the faces in the first frame as the marker and detecting for skin in the localized region. Specific advantages of this approach are that skin color analysis method is simple and powerful, and the system can be used to detect/track multiple faces.