Component-based Face Detection in Colour Images

Face detection is an important process in many applications such as face recognition, person identification and tracking, and access control. The technique used for face detection depends on how a face is modelled. In this paper, a face is defined as a skin region and a lips region that meet certain geometrical criteria. Thus, the face detection system has three main components: a skin detection module, a lips detection module, and a face verification module. The Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks was used for the skin and lips detection modules. In order to test the face detection system, two databases were created. The images in the first database, called In-house, were taken under controlled environment while those in the second database, called WWW, were collected from the World Wide Web and as such have no restriction on lighting, head pose or background. The system achieved a correct detection rate of 87 and 80 percent oil the In-house and WWW databases respectively