A Real-time Model for Multiple Human Face Tracking from Low-resolution Surveillance Videos

AbstractThis article discusses a novel approach of multiple-face tracking from low-resolution surveillance videos. There has been significant research in the field of face detection using neural-network based training. Neural network based face detection methods are highly accurate, albeit computationally intensive. Hence neural network based approaches are not suitable for real-time applications. The proposed approach approximately detects faces in an image solely using the color information. It detects skin region in an image and finds existence of eye and mouth region in the skin region. If it finds so, it marks the skin region as a face and fits an oriented rectangle to the face. The approach requires low computation and hence can be applied on subsequent frames from a video. The proposed approach is tested on FERET face database images, on different images containing multiple faces captured in unconstrained environments, and on frames extracted from IP surveillance camera

Role of color in face recognition

One of the key challenges in face perception lies in determining the contribution of different cues to face identification. In this study, we focus on the role of color cues. Although color appears to be a salient attribute of faces, past research has suggested that it confers little recognition advantage for identifying people. Here we report experimental results suggesting that color cues do play a role in face recognition and their contribution becomes evident when shape cues are degraded. Under such conditions, recognition performance with color images is significantly better than that with grayscale images. Our experimental results also indicate that the contribution of color may lie not so much in providing diagnostic cues to identity as in aiding low-level image-analysis processes such as segmentation

Detecting Faces in Impoverished Images

The ability to detect faces in images is of critical ecological significance. It is a pre-requisite for other important face perception tasks such as person identification, gender classification and affect analysis. Here we address the question of how the visual system classifies images into face and non-face patterns. We focus on face detection in impoverished images, which allow us to explore information thresholds required for different levels of performance. Our experimental results provide lower bounds on image resolution needed for reliable discrimination between face and non-face patterns and help characterize the nature of facial representations used by the visual system under degraded viewing conditions. Specifically, they enable an evaluation of the contribution of luminance contrast, image orientation and local context on face-detection performance

A survey of face detection, extraction and recognition

The goal of this paper is to present a critical survey of existing literatures on human face recognition over the last 4-5 years. Interest and research activities in face recognition have increased significantly over the past few years, especially after the American airliner tragedy on September 11 in 2001. While this growth largely is driven by growing application demands, such as static matching of controlled photographs as in mug shots matching, credit card verification to surveillance video images, identification for law enforcement and authentication for banking and security system access, advances in signal analysis techniques, such as wavelets and neural networks, are also important catalysts. As the number of proposed techniques increases, survey and evaluation becomes important

Detecção facial: autofaces versus antifaces

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica.No presente trabalho, é desenvolvido um estudo comparativo entre duas técnicas de detecção facial baseadas em projeções vetoriais: Autofaces e Antifaces. O método de Autofaces tem sido significativamente estudado nos últimos anos, enquanto o de Antifaces é ainda considerado o estado-da-arte para a detecção de objetos. Ambos os métodos são descritos de forma detalhada e, para o método de Antifaces, é proposto um procedimento que permite obter os detectores subótimos. Ambos os métodos são avaliados em condições idênticas de teste. Tais avaliações consideram detecções de características faciais, de objetos tridimensionais e de uma face específica, vista de um ângulo frontal. Finalmente, é feita uma análise de sensibilidade dos métodos ao ruído branco Gaussiano aditivo, a distorções no foco e a alterações na cena em que se apresenta o objeto de interesse. Através dos resultados obtidos, é possível constatar que, no método de Antifaces, os critérios para a determinação de algumas variáveis de projeto não estão ainda bem estabelecidos. Além disso, esse método apresenta alta seletividade durante o processo de detecção. O método de Autofaces possui maior capacidade de generalização e menor sensibilidade à adição de ruído, distorções no foco e alterações na cena