Face Localization using Geometric and Skin Characteristics

International audienceGeometric and skin face characteristics were used, in this paper, to localize face in images. In first stage, well known horizontal symmetric characteristic of face is exploited to localize the vertical symmetry axis of the face, then to delimit its vertical position in the image. In second stage, a neural network, trained to recognize pixel with skin characteristics, is used to completely localize the face by delimiting the region surrounding the vertical symmetry axis which colour characteristics agree with skin ones according to TSL colour space. At this stage, we explore three strategies to perform region delimitation. Finally, a quantitative measurement criterion is used to record localization quality. Experiments of the proposed method were carried out on images of XM2VTS database and also on a set of non-standar