Illumination Robust Facial Feature Detection via Decoupled Illumination and Texture Features

A method for illumination robust facial feature detection on frontal images of the human face is proposed. Illumination robust features are produced from weighted contributions of the texture and illumination components of an image where the illumination is estimated via Bayesian least-squares minimization with the required posterior probability inferred using an adaptive Monte-Carlo sampling approach. This estimate is used to decouple the illumination and texture components, from which Haar-like features are extracted. A weighted aggregate of each component’s features is then compared with a cascade of pre-trained classifiers for the face, eyes, nose, and mouth. Experimental results against the Yale Face Database B suggest higher sensitivity and F1 score values than current methods while maintaining comparable specificity and accuracy in the presence of non-ideal illumination conditions.