Fast Face Detection with Multi-Scale Window Search Free from Image Resizing Using SGI Features

Face detection is applied to many tasks such as auto focus control, surveillance, user interface, and face recognition. Processing speed and detection accuracy of the face detection have been improved continuously. This paper describes a novel method of fast face detection with multi-scale window search free from image resizing. We adopt statistics of gradient images (SGI) as image features and append an overlapping cell array to improve detection accuracy. The SGI feature is scale invariant and insensitive to small difference of pixel value. These characteristics enable the multi-scale window search without image resizing. Experimental results show that processing speed of our method is 3.66 times faster than a conventional method, adopting HOG features combined to an SVM classifier, without accuracy degradation.