Face Detection Using Skin Color and Gabor Wavelet Representation

This paper proposes a method that finds human faces as well as its landmark points on the face in an image. Salient facial landmark detection is one of the main task in a face recognition system since it enables face normalization and therefore leads to a size and orientation invariant face recognition system. The proposed approach first uses color information to detect face candidate regions and then uses a deformable Gabor wavelet graph matching to locate the facial landmark points describing the face. The latter allows for size and orientation variation since the search for landmark points allows for affine transformations of the Gabor wavelet graph. The search is performed using a genetic algorithm that is essential because it effectively searches the solution space. Results based on the proposed method are included to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.