Rotation Invariant Multiview Face Detection Using Skin Color Regressive Model and Support Vector Regression

In this paper, an automatic rotation invariant multiview face detection method, which utilizes modified Skin Color Model (SCM), is presented. First, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) based hybrid models are used to classify human skin regions from color images. The novelty of the adaptive hybrid model is its ability to predict the chromatic skin color band for individual images based on calibration differences of camera and luminance condition of environment. Classified skin regions are then converted to gray scale image with a threshold based on the predicted chromatic skin color bands, which further enhances detection performance. Next, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to gray segmented regions. Face detection is carried out based on the PCA-based extracted features, along with selected features, using support vector regression. The output of this procedure is used to report the final result of face detection. The proposed method is also beneficial for the rotation invariant face recognition problem.