Development of a Face Detection Algorithm Based on Skin Segmentation and Facial Feature Extraction

Abstract

This paper presents a face detection algorithm capable of detecting face(s) without prior training as a face classifier. The technique employed in developing the algorithm is based on skin segmentation and facial feature extraction of the two eyes and mouth. Skin segmentation was done in the red, green, blue color space. White balance correction was employed to correct the change in image temperature that occurs due to change in lighting conditions at the point of acquiring image. Morphological operations and bounding box were employed to search and extract face region from the segmented skin region. Facial feature, eyes and mouth, were extracted for final verification of the sensed face using the Laplacian of Gaussian filter and the isosceles triangle matching rules. The extracted features were used to develop the face detection algorithm. The developed algorithm was evaluated using random images taken under different lighting conditions. Furthermore, the efficiency of the developed face detection algorithm was evaluated using a standard face detection image database. The result obtained shows that the developed face detection algorithm performed satisfactorily well with 81.37% detection accuracy. Furthermore, the results obtained from the performance evaluation of the developed face detection for this study has shown it clearly that accuracy detection of dissimilar faces in images with complex background is possible and attainable.