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Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791

Facial feature extraction and pose determination


Athanasios Nikolaidis, Ioannis Pitas*
Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, P.O. Box 451, Thessaloniki 540 06, Greece
Received 22 October 1998; received in revised form 28 July 1999; accepted 28 July 1999

Abstract

A combined approach for facial feature extraction and determination of gaze direction is proposed that employs some
improved variations of the adaptive Hough transform for curve detection, minima analysis of feature candidates,
template matching for inner facial feature localization, active contour models for inner face contour detection and
projective geometry properties for accurate pose determination. The aim is to provide a su$cient set of features for
further use in a face recognition or face tracking system.  2000 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier
Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Minima analysis; Adaptive Hough transform; Template matching; Active contour models; Projective geometry; Biometric
properties

1. Introduction rules in the algorithms that are used to tackle these


problems.
One of the key problems in building automated sys- Several techniques for face recognition have been pro-
tems that perform face recognition tasks is face detection posed during the last years. They can be divided into two
and facial feature extraction. Many algorithms have been broad categories: techniques based on greylevel template
proposed for face detection in still images that are based matching and techniques based on the computation of
on texture, depth, shape and colour information. For certain geometrical features. An interesting comparison
example, face localization can be based on the observa- between the two categories can be found in Ref. [5].
tion that human faces are characterized by their oval Experimental research through years proved that each
shape and skin-colour [1]. Another very attractive ap- category covers techniques that perform better on the
proach for face detection relies on multiresolution images localization of certain facial features only. This implies
(also known as mosaic images) by attempting to detect that for every selected feature a fusion of methods of both
a facial region at a coarse resolution and, subsequently, categories should provide more stable results than the
to validate the outcome by detecting facial features at the corresponding method alone.
next resolution [2,3]. A critical survey on face recogni- Following similar reasoning, in this paper, we propose
tion can be found in Ref. [4]. the use of complementary techniques that are based on
The major di$culties encountered in face recognition geometrical shape parameterization, template matching
are due to variations in luminance, facial expressions, and dynamic deformation of active contours, aiming at
visual angles and other potential features such as glasses, providing a su$cient set of features that may be later
beard, etc. This leads to a need for employing several used for the recognition of a particular face. The success
of a speci"c technique depends on the nature of the
extracted feature. In the present paper, the features under
consideration are the eyebrows, the eyes, the nostrils, the
* Corresponding author. Tel.: #30-31-996304; fax: #30-31- mouth, the cheeks and the chin. The following methods
996304. are employed throughout the paper: (i) the extraction of
E-mail addresses: nikola@zeus.csd.auth.gr (A. Nikolaidis), eyes, nostrils and mouth based on minima analysis of the
pitas@zeus.csd.auth.gr (I. Pitas). x- and y-greylevel reliefs (Section 2.1), (ii) the extraction

0031-3203/00/$20.00  2000 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 0 3 1 - 3 2 0 3 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 1 7 6 - 4
1784 A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791

of cheeks and chin by performing an Adaptive Hough provides us with the possible vertical positions of the
Transform (AHT) [6] on the relevant subimage de"ned features. Afterwards the x-reliefs of the rows correspond-
according to the ellipse containing the main connected ing to the detected minima are computed, and minima
component of the image (Section 2.2), (iii) the extraction analysis follows once again in order to "nd the potential
of upper eyebrow edges using a template-based technique horizontal positions of the features.
that adapts a proper binary mask to an area restricted by After constructing the lists of signi"cant minima and
the position of the eyes (Section 2.3), (iv) the accurate maxima, candidate features are determined based on
extraction of the face contour by means of a dynamic several metrics, e.g. the relative position inside the head,
deformation of active contours (e.g. snakes), compensat- the signi"cance of maximum between minima, the dis-
ing for the lack of parametric information needed in the tance between minima, the similarity of greylevel values,
AHT (Section 3), and (v) the determination of the gaze and the ratio of distance between minima to head width.
direction by exploiting the face symmetry properties Finally, the best complete set of features is determined
(Section 4). Certain improvements in the proposed imple- based on the vertical symmetry of the set, the distances
mentations of both the AHT and the snakes techniques, between facial features and the assessment of each facial
compared to some previous works in the same "eld, are feature candidate, based on fuzzy set theory.
discussed throughout the corresponding sections. Some
experimental results that demonstrate the success of the
proposed approach are presented in Section 5. Finally, 2.2. Parameteric feature extraction using AHT
certain conclusions are drawn in Section 6.
In order to select an e$cient set of distances, a para-
meterized representation of some facial features is a good
approach towards the solution of the problem under
2. Facial feature extraction study. Such an assumption holds for certain features that
can be described in a realistic way by means of a geomet-
As described in Ref. [1], skin-like regions in an image ric curve. The cheeks can be approximated reasonably
can be discriminated by representing the image in the well by nearly vertical lines, and the chin by an upward
hue}saturation-value (HSV) colour space and by choos- parabola. A straightforward method to detect geometric
ing proper thresholds for the values of the hue and curves in an image is the Hough transform or one of its
saturation parameters. Other similar colour spaces that variations [7]. The use of an AHT is proposed in Ref. [8].
reside to the way the human vision interprets colour It is a variant of the Hough transform [6], which utilizes
information, like hue}saturation-intensity (HSI) or a small "xed size accumulator and follows a `coarse to
hue}luminance-saturation (HLS), could also be used. "nea accumulation until a desired parameter precision is
Considering the oval-like shape of a face in general, it is reached. This variation requires a reduced storage space
convenient to search for the connected components of compared to the standard transform due to the small
the skin-like regions using a region growing algorithm accumulator size. Accordingly, it provides a better per-
and to "t an ellipse to every connected component of formance than the standard transform due to the reduced
nearly elliptical shape. This is a basic preprocessing step, number of computations. Cheek border detection is
because it restricts the search area for the facial feature based on the fact that a straight line is represented by
detection. a linear equation of the form

2.1. Eyes, nostrils and mouth localization x"my#c, (1)

The extraction of features like eyes, nostrils and mouth where m is the slope and c is the intercept of the line. Thus
relies on the fact that they correspond to low-intensity the accumulator array is two dimensional, with each cell
regions of the face. In the case of the eyes, this is due to corresponding to a certain pair (m, c) of discrete values of
the colour of the pupils and the eye-sockets. As proposed the slope and intercept of the line. The inherent problem
in Ref. [1], "rst morphological operations are applied on in Eq. (1) that it cannot describe horizontal lines, is not
the image in order to enhance the dark regions. After a concern for cheek line detection. Nearly vertical lines
a normalization of the orientation of the face candidate, can easily be represented for mK0. The cheek border
the x- and y-projections of the greylevel relief are com- corresponds to the dominant vertical line in the relevant
puted. This helps us to search for facial features only subimage. Accordingly, the algorithm should search only
along the horizontal direction. for one line in the subimage. The main idea of the method
The y-projection of the topographic greylevel relief is is to focus on the parameter space on areas of large
"rst computed by averaging the pixel intensities of every accumulation by performing iterations of the basic
row. Signi"cant minima are determined based on the Hough algorithm and rede"ning the limits of the para-
gradient of each minimum to its neighbour maxima. This meter range accordingly. If we let a , 1)i)n be the
G
A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791 1785

parameters representing the curve under consideration


(in this case n"2, a "m, a "c), then the n-dimen-
 
sional search space in iteration i is

SG"¸G;¸G;2;¸G, (2)
  L
where ¸G is an interval (; , < ) of possible values of
H H H
parameter a .
H
The relevant subimage on which to apply the algo-
rithm should be adapted to our needs. In Ref. [8], the
relevant subimage is de"ned according to the distance
between the eyes and the width of the mouth. In our case,
the relevant subimage is de"ned as a region of the largest
best-"t ellipse found in the image, which acts as a good
initial description of the face prior to feature detection
and provides more stable results because it considers the
symmetric properties of the speci"c face in more detail.
The best-"t ellipse is assumed to contain the main facial
region. The success of a search inside the ellipse is en-
sured by the fact that the ellipse possesses the same
vertical symmetry with its enclosed face region. After Fig. 1. Illustration of relevant subimages for Hough transform.
experimentation and by taking into account some bio-
metric analogies of the human face, it has been found that
AHT should perform on a well chosen region of interest 2.3. Eyebrows extraction using template matching
for best performance.
Let a and b be the magnitudes of the major and minor Unlike the cheeks and the chin, the eyebrows cannot
semiaxes and (x , y ) be the centre of the best-"t ellipse. easily be described by means of a geometric curve, be-
  cause of their variations among various people. One way
The boundaries of a suitable subimage for our purposes,
should be of the form to cope with this problem is to consider only the upper
edge of the arch of the eyebrow for detection. This edge
x "x #p a, (3) constitutes a transition in the vertical direction, from a
KGL  FGEF
completely smooth area (the forehead) to an elongated
x "x #p a, (4)
K?V  JMU approximately horizontal dark region. This is illustrated
y "y #p b, (5) in Fig. 1. A template matching technique is more appro-
KGL  JCDR priate in this case. A prototype block has to be de"ned
y "y #p b, (6) explicitly, simulating the form of the upper edge of an
K?V  PGEFR
eyebrow, because no a priori information exists concern-
where p , p , p , p denote appropriate percent-
FGEF JMU JCDR PGEFR ing the approximate position of the correct block (e.g.
ages of the semiaxes magnitudes. from a previous frame). Let P be the prede"ned block
In the case of not perfectly frontal face images, the (acting as a mask) and B be the real block of the thre-
best-"t ellipse is rotated before the search procedure so G
sholded gradient of the image under consideration, where
that the main head axis is parallel to the x-axis [9]. B 3S with S being the set of all blocks centred on the
The chin can be described by the equation of an G
search area. The optimal block B has maximal correla-
upward parabola: MNR
tion to the prototype block. This is expressed by
x!x "g(y!y ), (7)
T T
B "+B 3S" P ) B "max P ) B ,, (8)
where (x , y ) is the vertex of the parabola and g is the MNR H H G Z1
G
T T
parameter which controls how fast the parabola opens
outwards. In this case, the accumulator array is three where the sums are considered over the binary values of
dimensional (n"3) having parameters a "g, a "x , the corresponding points of the prototype block and the
  T
a "y . The relevant subimage used for searching is real block. The size of the search block should be nor-
 T
de"ned as a certain region of the best-"t ellipse as well. malized according to the scaling factor of the face in the
By exploiting the inherent symmetry, we prevent Hough image. A straightforward way to normalize the search
transform from extracting some other features resem- process is to de"ne the dimensions of the block based
bling a parabola, like the lower edge of the lips. on the distance between the eyes. The optimal block is
A compensation for rotations along the z-axis is again expected to contain the upper edge of the eyebrow and
performed prior to the search procedure. can be used to provide a potential facial feature.
1786 A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791

3. Snake deformation for face contour de5nition internal energy term is considered to involve relations
between three adjacent pixels, and thus can be written as
In many cases, problems arise when there is no su$-
E (v )"a("v !v "#"v !v ")
cient edge information for acceptable performance of the GLR G G G\ G G>
AHT algorithm for "nding the cheeks or the chin. This is #b"v !2v #v ", (10)
usually due to the poor lighting conditions. The active G\ G G>
contour models [10] were introduced in the "eld of where a and b are normalization parameters that depend
object tracking and proved to be a helpful technique to on the dimensions of the speci"c image.
overcome this problem. The external energy comprises of two terms. The "rst
In some previous work [11], an open convex hull that one corresponds to the magnitude of the output of
is derived from the gradient image is used as an initializa- a gradient operator (e.g. Sobel operator), and helps at-
tion of the active contour (snake) that describes the face tract the snake to edges on the image. This is the main
contour. In our case, the best-"t ellipse is a much more external energy term over regions where a transition
accurate initial estimate for the inner contour of the face, from skin colour to background colour is dominant. The
because it is produced based on the skin-colour segmen- other external energy term refers to the degree of change
tation. The objective of the method is to consider the of the Euclidean distance between adjacent pairs of can-
best-"t ellipse surrounding the face as an active contour didate snaxels. This is to ensure that the smoothness of
(snake) which can be deformed so that its energy is the contour is retained in regions where there is poor
minimized or, equivalently, its optimal position is deter- contrast between the face region and the background.
mined. Thus the external energy component of the snake energy
During our experiments it was observed that the can be written as
best-"t ellipse usually covers an area which is wider
E (v )"E #E (11)
than the main oval region of the face because the hair CVR G GK?EC BGQR
was also included in the main connected component. with the two terms being
This implies that it is di$cult to reach an acceptable
approximation of the face contour when applying a local E "!"
I(x, y)", (12)
GK?EC
evolving deformation approach on the initial ellipse.
where I(x, y) denotes the grey level function of the orig-
Instead of using the best-"t ellipse as the initial snake,
inal image and
we additionally de"ne another ellipse of half-size axes


from the original. The snake elements are now con- d(v , v )
E "k 1! G\ G . (13)
strained to lie on certain lines joining points between the BGQR d(v , v )
two ellipses. The points (snaxels) were chosen such that G G>
successive snaxels have approximately equal Euclidean k is a normalizing factor that depends, again, on the
distances. image dimensions, and d( ) , ) ) denotes the Euclidean dis-
Several approaches to active contour modeling have tance between adjacent (candidate) snaxels.
been proposed [12}14] that either employ a greedy The result of the above procedure is an inner contour
algorithm or a dynamic programming technique. The of the face region, that excludes features attributed to
greedy algorithm tends to perform faster but has hair and ears and provides a region of interest very well
the drawback of converging to solutions that may located for searching the inner facial features.
correspond to local minima. In our work we chose
to implement a dynamic programming algorithm that
provides us with the required precision for the de"ni- 4. Determination of gaze direction
tion of the face contour, at the cost of a somewhat
slower performance. The energy of each snake point v is A facial feature extraction is related to the determina-
G
given by tion of gaze direction. Instead of using the midcentre of
the eyes and the projections of the face contour on the eye
E (v , v , v ) horizontal as in Ref. [15], we base our calculations on the
G\ G\ G G>
estimates of the positions of the eyes and the mouth.
"j E (v , v , v )#(1!j )E (v ), (9) Once these are correctly detected, and provided that the
G GLR G\ G G> G CVR G
tilt about the z-axis is insigni"cant, a good estimate of an
where j 3[0,1] is a regularization parameter, E de- angle uniquely de"ning the gaze direction can be ob-
G GLR
notes the internal energy of the snake, which a!ects the tained.
continuity and curvature of the snake, and E denotes Once the correct position of the eyes and mouth are
CVR
the external energy, which refers to the forces that pull determined, face symmetry properties can be exploited in
the snake towards signi"cant image features. In order order to determine the angle between the plane de"ned
to ensure the smoothness of the resulting contour, the by these three facial features and the image plane. The
A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791 1787

three facial features determine an isosceles triangle. If we and because triangle ABE is isosceles
consider one side of the triangle to lie on the image plane,
it is easy to compute a good estimate of the gaze direction "AE"""AB". (18)
angle. This is accomplished by means of trigonometric We obtain
functions of angles between the lines joining the selected
facial features, as shown in Fig. 2. In particular, let a be "DE""("AB"!"AD""("AB"!"AC"cos h (19)
the side of the triangle that lies on the image plane and and thus the angle
can be computed using the follow-
connects one of the eyes and the centre of the mouth. Let ing formula:
b be the orthogonal projection of the other side of equal
size onto the image plane. This is displayed in Fig. 2, "AC"sin h
where the projection of the isosceles triangle is represent- cos
" . (20)
("AB"!"AC"cos h
ed by continuous lines and is denoted as ABC, whereas
the isosceles triangle ABE is represented by dotted lines. A rule-of-thumb to determine the gaze direction is to
This means that, if the person in the "gure is staring look at the isosceles triangle as it is projected onto the
straight towards the observer, the projected triangle image plane: the biggest of the eye-to-mouth distances
should coincide with the isosceles one. The dashed lines reveals the direction at which the person is staring. The
denote a triangle CDE that lies on a plane that is perpen- success of the method depends, as is expected, on the
dicular to both the image plane and the plane of the correct detection of the eyes and mouth. This implies that
isosceles triangle. If we let h be the angle between lines the most accurate results are obtained when we have a
a and b, and
be the angle between the image plane and precise estimation of the centre of the mouth and of the
the isosceles triangle plane, then we have eye pupils.

"CD"
cos
" (14)
"DE" 5. Experimental results

from the triangle CDE, where " ) " denotes the length of the The above proposed methods were tested on a set of 37
corresponding line. From the triangle ACD we have images of the M2VTS project multimodal face database.
This set comprises the best frontal shots for each person.
"CD"""AC"sin h, (15) The choice of the speci"c shots among all the others was
based on an algorithm that exploits the vertical sym-
"AD"""AC"cos h. (16)
metry axis of the face [16].
From the triangle ADE we have Fig. 3 shows some examples of sets of correct feature
results. The best-"t ellipse as well as the corresponding
"AD"#"DE"""AE" (17) blocks where the cheeks and the chin were detected are
indicated. The values for the parameters p , p , p
JMU FGEF JCDR
and p are shown in Fig. 1. The selection of these areas
PGEFR
of the ellipse ensures that the edges found in these sub-
images contain part of the cheek or the chin and do not
contain other signi"cant features, like the ears. A small
accumulator of size 9;9 or 6;6;6 is used in the AHT
algorithm for cheek or chin detection, respectively. A line
segment is assumed to be interesting, if its length is at
least 10 pixels in the edge image obtained by applying
a Sobel edge operator [17] (of size 3;3) on the original
image (of size 350;286 for the image database used in
the experiments). Table 1 shows the results of extraction
of cheeks, chin and eyebrows for the set of images men-
tioned above. A set of features was extracted in all cases.
The assessment of the results was based on visual inspec-
tion and comparison to the results that one would expect
based on biometrical rules.
Problems have been encountered in cheek detection
when the false symmetry of the ellipse leads to bad
de"nition of the relevant subimage, and, thus, to an
erroneous extraction of some other features considered
Fig. 2. Geometry of projected isosceles triangle. as predominant. An example where hair is extracted
1788 A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791

instead of cheeks is shown in Fig. 4(a). Similar problems in providing additional information for the de"nition of
cause the AHT to fail in some cases of chin detection. The search space for inner facial features. This is illustrated
inability of the edge operator to detect weak edges caused in Fig. 5. Figs. 5(a)}(c) show the improvement that is
by bad luminance is more obvious here. An example of achieved in the de"nition of such features as cheeks and
wrong chin extraction is given in Fig. 4(b). chin compared to Figs. 4(a)}(c), respectively. Both the
The correct extraction of the eyebrows depends on the inner (best-"t) and the outer ellipses are shown in these
detection of the position of the eyes, as one would expect. "gures. The value of the regularization parameter j of
G
In our experiments the prototype was chosen to be of Eq. (9) was "xed at 0.3 for all of the snaxels. The method
height equal to 0.125 of the distance between the eyes and fails only in extreme cases, when the main connected
of width equal to 0.5 of the same distance. If at least one
eye is detected at a wrong position, and especially when
the distance between the eyes is bigger than the actual
one, the size of the block to be matched may be incorrect. Table 1
This may lead to the extraction of some feature other Detection percentage for facial feature extraction
than the desired one. Even when eyes are correctly ex-
tracted, a problem may arise if hair covers the forehead Features Correctly detected (%)
and the eyebrows, as it is shown in Fig. 4(c). The percent-
age of correct detection of the chin in Table 1 is rather Left cheek 78
low because of the lack of su$cient edge information in Right cheek 86
Chin 65
that region of the face.
Left eyebrow 73
In the case of images that su!er from a lack of edge
Right eyebrow 81
content, the dynamic programming algorithm succeeds

Fig. 3. Examples of good results for facial features.

Fig. 4. Examples of erroneous results for facial features.


A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791 1789

Fig. 5. Examples of results for face contour.

Fig. 6. Examples of results for gaze direction.

component of the image contains features that deform left at an angle of 83, and Fig. 6(c) shows a person looking
dramatically the actual face region (e.g. when no clear to the right at an angle of 193. The white triangles in these
separating line between the hair and the forehead exists). pictures correspond to the projection of the isosceles
Some other good results of the application of this method triangle on the image plane.
are shown in Figs. 5(d)}(f). The average computation time for locating the full set
Finally, the gaze direction determination technique led of facial features for each person, using the described
to correct results in all cases where eyes and mouth were methods, was 13.6 s on a Silicon Graphics Indy work-
extracted correctly. Fig. 6(a) shows an example of a per- station with an R4400 processor at 200 MHz, a R4000
son looking to the left at an angle of 183 compared to #oating point coprocessor and 64 Mbytes of main
a frontal picture, Fig. 6(b) shows a person looking to the memory.
1790 A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791

The results were good, considering the fact that the the inner face contour. Finally, the direction of gaze is
shots have not been really frontal in some cases, and that determined by using the symmetric properties of certain
the lighting conditions did not have a uniform e!ect all facial features and by applying rules of projective geo-
over the image. metry. The algorithms presented were tested on the
M2VTS multimodal face database.

6. Conclusions
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A. Nikolaidis, I. Pitas / Pattern Recognition 33 (2000) 1783}1791 1791

About the Author*ATHANASIOS NIKOLAIDIS was born in Serres, Greece, in 1973. He received the Diploma in Computer
Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1996. He is currently a research and teaching assistant and studies towards the
Ph.D. degree at the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research interests include nonlinear image and
signal processing and analysis, face detection and recognition and copyright protection of multimedia. Mr. Nikolaidis is a member of the
Technical Chamber of Greece.

About the Author*IOANNIS PITAS received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical
Engineering in 1985 both from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 1994, he has been a Professor at the Department of
Informatics, University of Thessaloniki. From 1980 to 1993 he served as scienti"c Assistant, Lecturer, Assistant Professor, and Associate
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the same University. He served as a Visiting Research Associate
at the University of Toronto, Canada, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany, Tampere University of Technology, Finland and as
Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He was lecturer in short courses for continuing education. His current interests
are in the areas of digital image processing, multidimensional signal processing and computer vision. He has published over 250 papers
and contributed in 8 books in his area of interest. He is the co-author of the book `Nonlinear Digital Filters: Principles and
Applicationsa (Kluwer, 1990) and author of `Digital image Processing Algorithmsa (Prentice Hall, 1993). He is the editor of the book
`Parallel Algorithms and Architectures for Digital Image Processing, Computer Vision and Neutral Networksa (Wiley, 1993). Dr. Pitas
has been a member of the European Community ESPRIT Parallel Action Committee. He has also been an invited speaker and/or
member of the program committee of several scienti"c conferences and workshops. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions
on Circuits and Systems and co-editor of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing and he is currently and Associate Editor of
the IEEE Transactions on Neutral Networks. He was chair of the 1995 IEEE Workshop on Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing
(NSIP95).

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