Parallelizing cascaded face detection

One or more portions of a cascaded face detection process, such as a process using a number of stages in which each stage includes classifiers having one or more associated features, can be parallelized. For instance, multiple pixels associated with an image can be evaluated in parallel, including simultaneously evaluating one or more features for each of the selected pixels. As a result, the number of operations required to perform the face detection processing can be reduced. Further, pre-processing can be performed to identify one or more image regions for which face detection process need not be performed. For instance, either or both of a skin-tone measure and a variance measure can be used to identify image regions in which a face is unlikely to be depicted.