Face Detection

First Steps

In the first small part of our project we didn’t start as usually with reading papers or anything like that: We tried to come up with our own ideas of how face detection can work. This was done without looking into literature to prevent to get influenced by ideas of other people or standard approaches.

Color Composition

One thing we looked at was the composition of the color of a given picture. With calculating average colors from different areas of the picture we find that it is possible to decide if the given picture is showing a face (portrait) or not. For this method it is necessary that a colored picture is available which can be investigated. When using this method it is very important that the picture/picture area, which is investigated, shows not only the face, but also the surrounding of it, i.e. some background, to have a difference between the face (red area) and the non-face area (green area).

With choosing color values from random pixels in the two areas, calculating mean values and standard deviations and comparing these results one can decide if the investigated area has an face in the middle or not.

An improvement of this method was reached by looking also at the color values of random pixels from the whole picture. With the knowledge of which difference should occure comparing the values of the whole image and just the area in the middle if the picture is showing a face another kind of decision could be found.

Other Methods

Another possibility which come to our minds was the detection of contrast in a picture to detect the circumference of a face.

Summary

All in all we had a few successes in this first part, but we weren't satisfied, therefore we began to study papers and ideas in face detection and face recognition, which had come up in the scientific community so far.