A robust approach to face and eyes detection from images with cluttered background

Automatic face location in complex scenes is extremely challenging in human face recognition systems. Further more, the facial features detection also plays an important role. The paper presents a scheme for robust face and eyes detection from an image. The scheme uses the Gaussian steerable filter to search and detect the facial feature (preattentive feature) roughly in an image. The face model is investigated to locate the whole face and facial features, such as eyes, nose and mouth. Here, multiple evidences are used in the face location and eyes detection. One important feature is the structural information of the face, i.e. facial components of certain structure. The other is the symmetry property of the face, here only the front face with certain pose variation is considered. It will reduce the computation greatly. For facial components detection, some image features and PCA features are used for verification from the candidates detected before. Experiments show that the algorithm is robust and fast.