Face Detection

Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, Takeo Kanade

[Henry A. Rowley] [Shumeet Baluja] [Takeo Kanade]
(easy cases, see paper 1 below)

[Rotated Face]
(difficult cases, see paper 2 below)
(The eye locations are merely to show the orientation of the detected face. They were not located by the detector.)

Thesis Dissertation

You can download my thesis dissertation [9.5 MB gzipped postscript, about 30 MB uncompressed].

Demo and Results

We digitized some video sequences at about 3-5 frames per second at a resolution of 320x240 pixels. These images were then processed by the face detector, taking about 5-10 seconds per frame on a 200 MHz SGI Indigo. The results were then MPEG encoded, resulting in the following four videos: [person walking] [web browsing] [person walking again] [crowd]

Papers

  1. Neural Network-Based Face Detection, by Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Takeo Kanade. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, volume 20, number 1, pages 23-38, January 1998.
  2. Rotation Invariant Neural Network-Based Face Detection, by Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Takeo Kanade. Accepted for oral presentation at Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1998, pages 38-44. Also available as CMU CS Technical Report CMU-CS-97-201, 1997.
You can also look at Henry Rowley's thesis proposal document and proposal presentation slides, 1996. Also available are some older papers whose content is covered by the papers above.

Test Data

The test images used in the above papers are available. I encourage other people working on face detection to use these images, to provide a standard for comparison.

Applications

Several researchers have incorporated this face detection system into their own projects:

Contact Information

For more information, please contact a current member of the Face Group.

Related Links

Below are a few resources related to facial image processing on the web. Please let me know if there important items missing.
Henry A. Rowley (har@cs.cmu.edu)
Shumeet Baluja (baluja@cs.cmu.edu)
Takeo Kanade (tk@cs.cmu.edu)