Face Detection Based on Map of Mahalanobis Distance to Skin in Color Image

A method of face detection is proposed, which is based on the color of skin. A skin color model is constructed, which detects skin area in a color image and figures out map of Mahalanobis distance to skin. Based on map of Mahalanobis distance eigenface subspace is found out and a BP neural network model is constructed. On the BP neural network, input is coefficient vector obtained from map of Mahalanobis distance projecting on subspace, and output determines whether this area is face image. Experimental results show the method is effective.