Facial Feature Detection and Facial Contour Extraction using Snakes
Kyung-Hee Lee, Hyeran Byun · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. so'peuteuweeo mich eung'yong · 2000
This paper proposes a method to detect a facial region and extract facial features which is crucial for visual recognition of human faces. In this paper, we extract the MER(Minimum Enclosing Rectangle) of a face and facial components using projection analysis on both edge image and binary image. We use an active contour model(snakes) for extraction of the contours of eye, mouth, eyebrow, and face in order to reflect the individual differences of facial shapes and converge quickly. The determination of initial contour is very important for the performance of snakes. Particularly, we detect Minimum Enclosing Rectangle(MER) of facial components and then determine initial contours using general shape of facial components within the boundary of the obtained MER. We obtained experimental results to show that MER extraction of the eye, mouth, and face was performed successfully. But in the case of images with bright eyebrow, MER extraction of eyebrow was performed poorly. We obtained good contour extraction with the individual differences of facial shapes. Particularly, in the eye contour extraction, we combined edges by first order derivative operator and zero crossings by second order derivative operator in designing energy function of snakes, and we achieved good eye contours. For the face contour extraction, we used both edges and grey level intensity of pixels in designing of energy function. Good face contours were extracted as well.