Elsevier

Image and Vision Computing

Volume 32, Issue 12, December 2014, Pages 979-993
Image and Vision Computing

Discrete area filters in accurate detection of faces and facial features

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imavis.2014.09.004Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper introduces a new method for detection of faces and facial features. Proposed algorithm denies the thesis that bottom-up solutions can't work at reasonable speed. It introduces fast detection – about 9 frames per second for a 384 × 256 image – while preserving accurate details of the detection. Main experiments focus on the detection of the eye centers — crucial in many computer vision systems such as face recognition, eye movement detection or iris recognition, however algorithm is tuned to detect 15 fiducial face points. Models were trained on nearly frontal faces. Bottom-up approach allows to detect objects under partial occlusion — particularly two out of four face parts (left eye, right eye, nose, mouth) must be localized. Precision of the trained model is verified on the Feret dataset. Robustness of the face detection is evaluated on the BioID, LFPW, Feret, GT, Valid and Helen databases in comparison to the state of the art detectors.

Introduction

Accurate face and facial feature detection plays a major role in image processing techniques. In order to perform reliable face recognition, significant parts of the faces must be precisely localized, for example eye centers. Lack of accuracy highly decreases efficiency of the identification. Simple holistic face detection algorithms, for example the one used in popular Viola and Jones method, are trained in such fashion, that the eye centers are located in the specific locations of the bounding box. In practice the position of the detected faces isn't very precise and it gives only regional information. In order to perform reliable face recognition more sophisticated algorithms should be used.

Many methods cope with this problem, but they usually suffer from a subset of several disadvantages — model isn't flexible enough to cover all the variability of the human face (AAM, ASM), different treatment is needed for each part of the face [1], or only localisation of one face is possible.

There is also a possibility of refining face/facial feature position already given by the bounding box detector. Such algorithms often use content versus context approach [1] or detailed knowledge-based rules. Such top-down approach (from general information to details) often ensures high speed of the localization, but on the other hand, holistic methods tend to reject partially occluded faces. Some of the algorithms are trained using also such difficult examples, but the final detector tends to have rather lower accuracy on the non-occluded faces.

This article presents new bottom-up (from details to the general information) algorithm for detecting facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) and faces. It introduces new extraction and classifications methods for detecting characteristic face points (such as eye corner and mouth corner) — discrete area filters (DAF) and modified positive-to-negative linear discriminant analysis (mLDA). Points belonging to the specific categories are merged into face parts and implicitly to faces by the voting process combined with agglomerative clustering and the reference graph. Article proves that such an approach yields accurate detection comparing to manual marking, high detection rates and allows the detection of partially occluded faces.

Paper is divided as follows:

  • Section 2 presents problem formulation and current state-of-the-art in the face and facial feature detection and localization.

  • Section 3 provides basic information about each step of the algorithm, including discrete area filters and modified linear discriminant analysis.

  • Section 4 describes performed experiments along with their interpretation.

  • Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Problem formulation and related work

In this paper fiducial point detection stands for defining number and positions of all the points of specific category, for example inner eye corners or nose tips. Facial feature detection or face part detection stands for defining number and positions of all complex parts of the face such as nose, mouth or eyes. Face detection stands for defining the number and position of all the faces present in the digital image. This can be achieved in several ways, for example by defining a bounding box,

Algorithm description

Face detection algorithm is designed in a bottom-up fashion. After defining prior points of interest — edge points, each point is classified into one of the defined categories (Fig. 1). Each point votes for the center of the face feature which is a part of, basing on the vectors assigned to each class, similarly to the generalized Hough transform (for example eye corner votes for the eye center). After detecting independently eyes, noses and mouths, we compare responses to the reference graph

Algorithm training

Algorithm's parameters were trained in a supervised fashion. Note, that each fiducial point/non-fiducial point classifier is trained separately, resulting in 9 detectors. We chose 1980 face images with marked face points (positive examples) and a set of 10,000 non-face images (negative examples). We also defined a set of possible discrete area filters (Appendix A). To assure high variability of the provided faces, positive examples were gathered from various databases:

  • Banca — subset used in a

Conclusion

This paper presents a novel algorithm for face and facial feature detection. Proposed extraction scheme based on new discrete area filters (DAF) and modification of the linear discriminant analysis proves to be robust and fast. Accurate results, comparable to the manual markings, and on-line detection make this method competitive to the current state-of-the-art. Algorithms introduce no bounds to the number of the detected faces and prove to introduce very low number of false acceptance, for

Jacek Naruniec received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at Warsaw University of Technology in 2006 and 2010, respectively. His work is mainly concentrated on semantic image analysis, especially human faces. He is currently working as an assistant professor in the Institute of Radioelectronics at Warsaw University of Technology and as a researcher at the Center of Cosmic Research in Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His courses refer mainly to semantic object analysis and object programming.

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    Jacek Naruniec received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at Warsaw University of Technology in 2006 and 2010, respectively. His work is mainly concentrated on semantic image analysis, especially human faces. He is currently working as an assistant professor in the Institute of Radioelectronics at Warsaw University of Technology and as a researcher at the Center of Cosmic Research in Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His courses refer mainly to semantic object analysis and object programming.

    This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Stefanos Zafeiriou.

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