Face detection using quantized skin color regions merging and wavelet packet analysis

Detecting and recognizing human faces automatically in digital images strongly enhance content-based video indexing systems. In this paper, a novel scheme for human faces detection in color images under nonconstrained scene conditions, such as the presence of a complex background and uncontrolled illumination, is presented. Color clustering and filtering using approximations of the YCbCr and HSV skin color subspaces are applied on the original image, providing quantized skin color regions. A merging stage is then iteratively performed on the set of homogeneous skin color regions in the color quantized image, in order to provide a set of potential face areas. Constraints related to shape and size of faces are applied, and face intensity texture is analyzed by performing a wavelet packet decomposition on each face area candidate in order to detect human faces. The wavelet coefficients of the band filtered images characterize the face texture and a set of simple statistical deviations is extracted in order to form compact and meaningful feature vectors. Then, an efficient and reliable probabilistic metric derived from the Bhattacharrya distance is used in order to classify the extracted feature vectors into face or nonface areas, using some prototype face area vectors, acquired in a previous training stage.