Detection and tracking of facial features

摘要

Abstract: Detection and tracking of facial features without using any head mounted devices may become required in various future visual communication applications, such as teleconferencing, virtual reality etc. In this paper we propose an automatic method of face feature detection using a method called edge pixel counting. Instead of utilizing color or gray scale information of the facial image, the proposed edge pixel counting method utilized the edge information to estimate the face feature positions such as eyes, nose and mouth in the first frame of a moving facial image sequence, using a variable size face feature template. For the remaining frames, feature tracking is carried out alternatively using a method called deformable template matching and edge pixel counting. One main advantage of using edge pixel counting in feature tracking is that it does not require the condition of a high inter frame correlation around the feature areas as is required in template matching. Some experimental results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.!15