5197 results about "Face detection" patented technology

A method for determining the presence of a face from image data includes a face detection algorithm having two separate algorithmic steps: a first step of prescreening image data with a first component of the algorithm to find one or more face candidate regions of the image based on a comparison between facial shape models and facial probabilities assigned to image pixels within the region; and a second step of operating on the face candidate regions with a second component of the algorithm using a pattern matching technique to examine each face candidate region of the image and thereby confirm a facial presence in the region, whereby the combination of these components provides higher performance in terms of detection levels than either component individually. In a camera implementation, a digital camera includes an algorithm memory for storing an algorithm comprised of the aforementioned first and second components and an electronic processing section for processing the image data together with the algorithm for determining the presence of one or more faces in the scene. Facial data indicating the presence of faces may be used to control, e.g., exposure parameters of the capture of an image, or to produce processed image data that relates, e.g., color balance, to the presence of faces in the image, or the facial data may be stored together with the image data on a storage medium.

An image processing apparatus for tracking faces in an image stream iteratively receives an acquired image from the image stream potentially including one or more face regions. The acquired image is sub-sampled at a specified resolution to provide a sub-sampled image. An integral image is then calculated for a least a portion of the sub-sampled image. Fixed size face detection is applied to at least a portion of the integral image to provide a set of candidate face regions. Responsive to the set of candidate face regions produced and any previously detected candidate face regions, the resolution is adjusted for sub-sampling a subsequent acquired image.

A technique for processing a digital image uses face detection to achieve one or more desired image processing parameters. A group of pixels is identified that corresponds to a face image within the digital image. A skin tone is detected for the face image by determining one or more default color or tonal values, or combinations thereof, for the group of pixels. Values of one or more parameters are adjusted for the group of pixels that correspond to the face image based on the detected skin tone.

A method and system of identity masking to obscure identities corresponding to face regions in an image is disclosed. A face detector is applied to detect a set of possible face regions in the image. Then an identity masker is used to process the detected face regions by identity masking techniques in order to obscure identities corresponding to the regions. For example, a detected face region can be blurred as if it is in motion by a motion blur algorithm, such that the blurred region can not be recognized as the original identity. Or the detected face region can be replaced by a substitute facial image by a face replacement algorithm to obscure the corresponding identity.

A processor-based system operating according to digitally-embedded programming instructions includes a face detection module for identifying face regions within digital images. A normalization module generates a normalized version of the face region. A face recognition module extracts a set of face classifier parameter values from the normalized face region that are referred to as a faceprint. A workflow module compares the extracted faceprint to a database of archived faceprints previously determined to correspond to known identities. The workflow module determines based on the comparing whether the new faceprint corresponds to any of the known identities, and associates the new faceprint and normalized face region with a new or known identity within a database. The archived faceprints are digitally organized and may be selectively recalled along with their associated parent images. A database module serves to archive data corresponding to the new faceprint and its associated parent image according to the associating by the workflow module within one or more digital data storage media.

A method of automatic or assisted recomposing of digital image processing uses face detection. Pixels that correspond to a face within a digital image are identified. A re-compositioned image is based on spatial or other parameters of the detected image, particularly in relation to the entire digital image or other portions of the image.

A database includes an identifier and associated parameters for each of a number of faces to be recognized. A new acquired image from an image stream is received potentially including one or more face regions. Face detection is applied to at least a portion of the acquired image to provide a set of candidate face regions each having a given size and a respective location. Using the database, face recognition is selectively applied to at least one of the candidate face regions to provide an identifier for a face recognized in a candidate face region. A portion of the image is stored including the recognized face in association with at least one image of the image stream.

A method of modifying the viewing parameters of digital images using face detection for achieving a desired spatial parameters based on one or more sub-groups of pixels that correspond to one or more facial features of the face. Such methods may be used for animating still images, automating and streamlining application such as the creation of slide shows and screen savers of images containing faces.

A display arrangement comprises an image display device having two or more sets of images for display; a camera directed towards positions adopted by users viewing the display; a face detector for detecting human faces in images captured by the camera, the face detector being arranged to detect faces in at least two face categories; and means, responsive to the a frequency of detection of categories of faces by the face detector at one or more different periods, for selecting a set of images to be displayed on the image display device at that time of day.

A face detection and / or detection method includes acquiring a digital color image. An active appearance model (AAM) is applied including an interchannel-decorrelated color space. One or more parameters of the model are matched to the image. Face detection results based on the matching and / or different results incorporating the face detection result are communicated.

Within a digital rendering device, such as printers, hard copy and soft copy display, and copiers, rendering parameters of a digital image are perfected as part of an image rendering process using face detection within said rendered image to achieve one or more desired image rendering parameters. Default values are determined of one or more image attributes of at least some portion of the digital image. Values of one or more digital-rendering-device rendering parameters are determined. Groups of pixels are identified that correspond to an image of a face within the digitally-rendered image. Corresponding image attributes to the groups of pixels are determined. One or more default image attribute values are compared with one or more rendered image attribute values based upon analysis of the image of the face. One or more digital-rendering-device rendering parameters are then adjusted corresponding to adjusting the image attribute values.

A face imaging system for recordal and / or automated identity confirmation, including a camera unit and a camera unit controller. The camera unit includes a video camera, a rotatable mirror system for directing images of the security area into the video camera, and a ranging unit for detecting the presence of a target and for providing target range data, comprising distance, angle and width information, to the camera unit controller. The camera unit controller includes software for detecting face images of the target, tracking of detected face images, and capture of high quality face images. A communication system is provided for sending the captured face images to an external controller for face verification, face recognition and database searching. Face detection and face tracking is performed using the combination of video images and range data and the captured face images are recorded and / or made available for face recognition and searching.

A system and method for automatic detecting neutral expressionless faces in digital images and video is described. First a face detector is used to detect the pose and position of a face and find the facial components. Second, the detected face is normalized to a standard size face. Then a set of geometrical facial features and three histograms in zones of mouth are extracted. Finally, by feeding these features to a classifier, the system detects if there is the neutral expressionless face or not.

A method and system for use in detecting a face of a person includes providing image data representative of reflected light of a scene in at least one bandwidth within a reflected infrared radiation range. Regions of the scene in the image data which may correspond to one or both eyebrows of a person and which may correspond to one or both eyes of the person are extracted from the data. The extracted regions which may correspond to one or both eyebrows of the person are combined with the extracted regions that may correspond to one or both eyes of the person resulting in a composite feature image. The composite feature image is searched based on model data representative of an eye region to detect one or both eyes of the person.

Face detection techniques are provided that use a multiple-stage face detection algorithm. An exemplary three-stage algorithm includes a first stage that applies linear-filtering to enhance detection performance by removing many non-face-like portions within an image, a second stage that uses a boosting chain that is adopted to combine boosting classifiers within a hierarchy “chain” structure, and a third stage that performs post-filtering using image pre-processing, SVM-filtering and color-filtering to refine the final face detection prediction. In certain further implementations, the face detection techniques include a two-level hierarchy in-plane pose estimator to provide a rapid multi-view face detector that further improves the accuracy and robustness of face detection.

Within a digital acquisition device, acquisition parameters of a digital image are perfected as part of an image capture process using face detection within said captured image to achieve one or more desired image acquisition parameters. Default values are determined of one or more image attributes of at least some portion of the digital image. Values of one or more camera acquisition parameters are determined. Groups of pixels are identified that correspond to an image of a face within the digitally-captured image. Corresponding image attributes to the groups of pixels are determined. One or more default image attribute values are compared with one or more captured image attribute values based upon analysis of the image of the face. Camera acquisition parameters are then adjusted corresponding to adjusting the image attribute values.

A processor-based system operating according to digitally-embedded programming instructions performs a method including identifying a group of pixels corresponding to a face region within digital image data acquired by an image acquisition device. A set of face analysis parameter values is extacted from said face region, including a faceprint associated with the face region. First and second reference faceprints are determined for a person using reference images captured respectively in predetermined face-portrait conditions and using ambient conditions. The faceprints are analyzed to determine a baseline faceprint and a range of variability from the baseline associated with the person. Results of the analyzing are stored and used in subsequent recognition of the person in a subsequent image acquired under ambient conditions.

A method (100) of locating human faces, if present, in a cluttered scene captured on a digital image (105) is disclosed. The method (100) relies on a two step process, the first being the detection of segments with a high probability of being human skin in the color image (105), and to then determine a bounday box, or other boundary indication, to border each of those segments. The second step (140) is the analysis of features within each of those boundary boxes to determine which of the segments are likely to be a human face. As human skin is not highly textured, in order to detect segments with a high probability of being human skin, a binary texture map (121) is formed from the image (105), and segments having high texture are discarded.

A processor-based system operating according to digitally-embedded programming instructions includes a face detection module for identifying face regions within digital images. A normalization module generates a normalized version of the face region. A face recognition module automatically extracts a set of face classifier parameter values from the normalized face region that are referred to as a faceprint. A workflow module automatically compares the extracted faceprint to a database of archived faceprints previously determined to correspond to known identities. The workflow module determines based on the comparing whether the new faceprint corresponds to any of the known identities, and associates the new faceprint and normalized face region with a new or known identity within a database. A database module serves to archive data corresponding to the new faceprint and its associated parent image according to the associating by the workflow module within one or more digital data storage media.

A system and method for real-time multi-view (i.e. not just frontal view) face detection. The system and method uses a sequence of detectors of increasing complexity and face / non-face discriminating thresholds to quickly discard non-faces at the earliest stage possible, thus saving much computation compared to prior art systems. The detector-pyramid architecture for multi-view face detection uses a coarse-to-fine and simple-to-complex scheme. This architecture solves the problem of lengthy processing that precludes real-time face detection effectively and efficiently by discarding most of non-face sub-windows using the simplest possible features at the earliest possible stage. This leads to the first real-time multi-view face detection system which has the accuracy almost as good as the state-of-the-art system yet 270 times faster, allowing real-time performance.

A method of tracking a face in a reference image stream using a digital image acquisition device includes acquiring a full resolution main image and an image stream of relatively low resolution reference images each including one or more face regions. One or more face regions are identified within two or more of the reference images. A relative movement is determined between the two or more reference images. A size and location are determined of the one or more face regions within each of the two or more reference images. Concentrated face detection is applied to at least a portion of the full resolution main image in a predicted location for candidate face regions having a predicted size as a function of the determined relative movement and the size and location of the one or more face regions within the reference images, to provide a set of candidate face regions for the main image.

A face detection method based on a skin color and a pattern match. A face detection method includes: detecting skin color pixels using color information of an image; calculating a proportion of the skin color pixels occupying each predetermined sub-window of the image; selecting ones of the predetermined sub-windows as face candidates when the proportions of the skin color pixels in the ones of the sub-windows are at least equal to a threshold value; and determining whether any of the face candidates is a face and storing a location of the face.

A facial expression recognition system that uses a face detection apparatus realizing efficient learning and high-speed detection processing based on ensemble learning when detecting an area representing a detection target and that is robust against shifts of face position included in images and capable of highly accurate expression recognition, and a learning method for the system, are provided. When learning data to be used by the face detection apparatus by Adaboost, processing to select high-performance weak hypotheses from all weak hypotheses, then generate new weak hypotheses from these high-performance weak hypotheses on the basis of statistical characteristics, and select one weak hypothesis having the highest discrimination performance from these weak hypotheses, is repeated to sequentially generate a weak hypothesis, and a final hypothesis is thus acquired. In detection, using an abort threshold value that has been learned in advance, whether provided data can be obviously judged as a non-face is determined every time one weak hypothesis outputs the result of discrimination. If it can be judged so, processing is aborted. A predetermined Gabor filter is selected from the detected face image by an Adaboost technique, and a support vector for only a feature quantity extracted by the selected filter is learned, thus performing expression recognition.

A digital system is provided that combines a digital video camera with television displays, and controlled by a controller module to enhance television performance according to personal television settings, parental controls and energy saving functions, achieved by utilizing the camera and face detection / recognition methods implemented in the controller module.

A method of tracking faces in an image stream with a digital image acquisition device includes receiving images from an image stream including faces, calculating corresponding integral images, and applying different subsets of face detection rectangles to the integral images to provide sets of candidate regions. The different subsets include candidate face regions of different sizes and / or locations within the images. The different candidate face regions from different images of the image stream are each tracked.

Integrated intelligent system adapted for any operating system and / or multi-OS computing environment seamlessly having sensory input / data acquisition cum recording server group and / or analytics server group enabling fail-safe integration and / or optimized utilization of various sensory inputs for various utility applications. Also disclosed as added advancements include intelligent method / system for cost-effective and efficient band adaptive transferring / recording sensory data from single or multiple data sources to network accessible storage devices, fail safe and self sufficient server group based method for sensory input recording and live streaming in a multi-server environment, intelligent and unified method of colour coherent object analysis, face detection in video images and the like, resource allocation for analytical processing involving multi channel environment, multi channel join-split mechanism adapted for low and / or variable bandwidth network link, enhanced multi-colour and / or mono-colour object tracking and also an intelligent automated traffic enforcement system.

An image processing apparatus for tracking faces in an image stream iteratively receives a new acquired image from the image stream, the image potentially including one or more face regions. The acquired image is sub-sampled (112) at a specified resolution to provide a sub-sampled image. An integral image is then calculated for a least a portion of the sub-sampled image. Fixed size face detection (20) is applied to at least a portion of the integral image to provide a set of candidate face regions. Responsive to the set of candidate face regions produced and any previously detected candidate face regions, the resolution at which a next acquired image is sub-sampled is adjusted.

A method and apparatus for processing a video sequence is disclosed. The apparatus may include a video processor for detecting and tracking at least one identifiable face in a video sequence. The method may include performing face detection of at least one identifiable face, selecting a face template including face features used to represent the at least one identifiable face, processing the video sequence to detect faces similar to the at least one identifiable face, and tracking the at least one identifiable face in the video sequence.

An image processing apparatus for tracking faces in an image stream iteratively receives a new acquired image from the image stream, the image potentially including one or more face regions. The acquired image is sub-sampled (112) at a specified resolution to provide a sub-sampled image. An integral image is then calculated for a least a portion of the sub-sampled image. Fixed size face detection (20) is applied to at least a portion of the integral image to provide a set of candidate face regions. Responsive to the set of candidate face regions produced and any previously detected candidate face regions, the resolution at which a next acquired image is sub-sampled is adjusted.