Real-time multiple face detection using active illumination

This paper presents a multiple face detector based on a robust pupil detection technique. The pupil detector uses active illumination that exploits the retro-reflectivity property of eyes to facilitate detection. The detection range of this method is appropriate for interactive desktop and kiosk applications. Once the location of the pupil candidates are computed, the candidates are filtered and grouped into pairs that correspond to faces using heuristic rules. To demonstrate the robustness of the face detection technique, a dual-mode face tracker was developed, which is initialized with the most salient detected face. Recursive estimators are used to guarantee the stability of the process and combine the measurements from the multi-face detector and a feature correlation tracker. The estimated position of the face is used to control a pan-tilt servo mechanism in real-time, that moves the camera to keep the tracked face always centered in the image.