An efficient face detection based on color-filtering and its application to smart devices

This paper proposes a means of using facial color to enhance conventional face detectors. To detect face rapidly, the proposed approach adopts a color filtering based efficient region scanning method. The scanning method skips over regions that do not contain candidate faces, based on a facial color membership function. Then it adopts a face/non-face classifier using facial color at the preprocessor of the face detector. This classifier has low computational cost and can reject non-face regions at an early stage of face detection. By integrating the proposed face detector with a kernel based object tracker, a real-time face detection and tracking application is implemented for smart devices. The proposed method considerably reduces the overall computation time and reduces the number of false alarms.