Far Distance Face Detection from The Interest Areas Expansion based on User Eye-tracking Information

Face detection methods using image processing have been proposed in many different ways. Generally, the most widely used method for face detection is an Adaboost that is proposed by Viola and Jones. This method uses Haar-like feature for image learning, and the detection performance depends on the learned images. It is well performed to detect face images within a certain distance range, but if the image is far away from the camera, face images become so small that may not detect them with the pre-learned Haar-like feature of the face image. In this paper, we propose the far distance face detection method that combine the Aadaboost of Viola-Jones with a saliency map and user's attention information. Saliency Map is used to select the candidate face images in the input image, face images are finally detected among the candidated regions using the Adaboost with Haar-like feature learned in advance. And the user's eye-tracking information is used to select the interest regions. When a subject is so far away from the camera that it is difficult to detect the face image, we expand the small eye gaze spot region using linear interpolation method and reuse that as input image and can increase the face image detection performance. We confirmed the proposed model has better results than the conventional Adaboost in terms of face image detection performance and computational time.