Locating human faces in a complex background including non-face skin colors

We propose a skin-color-based face location algorithm that can locate the human face in a complex background including nonface skin color regions, such as the hands. The algorithm is divided into three steps. The first step involves the use of color components to segment the skin colors from the complex background. The second step detects a curve called the division curve that delineates the boundary between the hair region and the face region. In the last step, the division curve is used to estimate the face region. The proposed algorithm has wide application to problems where the detection of both hands and face is requisite and to problems in which the distribution of skin/hair color can be known a priori. (C) 2003 SPIE and IST.