Efficient face candidates selector for face detection

in this paper an efficient face candidates selector is proposed for face detection tasks in still gray level images. The proposed method acts as a selective attentional mechanism. Eye-analogue segments at a given scale are discovered by finding regions which are roughly as large as real eyes and are darker than their neighborhoods. Then a pair of eye-analogue segments are hypothesized to be eyes in a face and combined into a face candidate if their placement is consistent with the anthropological characteristic of human eyes. The proposed method is robust in that it can deal with illumination changes and moderate rotations. A subset of the FERET data set and the BioID face database are used to evaluate the proposed method. The proposed face candidates selector is successful in 98.75% and 98.6% cases, respectively. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.