A feature-based approach for segmenting faces

Human face detection has always been an important problem for face, expression and gesture recognition. Though numerous attempts have been made to detect and localize faces, these approaches have made assumptions that restrict their extension to more general cases. We identify that the key factor in a generic and robust system is that of using a large amount of image evidence, related and reinforced by model knowledge through a probabilistic framework. In this paper, we propose a feature-based algorithm for segmenting faces that is sufficiently generic and is also easily extensible to cope with more demanding variations of the imaging conditions. The algorithm detects feature points from the image and groups them into face candidates using geometric and grey level constraints. Preliminary results are provided to support the validity of the approach and demonstrate its capability to segment faces under different scales, orientations and viewpoints.