Introduction to Face Detection and Face Recognition

Biometric techniques play a bigger and bigger role in nowadays research and development, because more and more applications find their place in people’s life: Finger prints to login on your OS, to get in your workout centre or to start your car engine aren’t rare anymore. On higher (security) levels scans of the eye are used. Cameras are present on many public places to improve security and this works fine with motion detectors if it is not necessary to identify the person on the picture automatically. Overlooking the fact that not everybody agrees with the presence of the cameras it is a difficult problem to detect and recognize faces on given camera images. There are a lot of approaches to this problem, which have all advantages and disadvantages.

The aim of this project is to get an idea of some (simple) methods and algorithms, how faces can be detected in images and how they can be identified or matched with a given face database.