Code: ________________

Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development

Face Detection Based on Skin Color

Yang Ling
Gu Xiaohan
June2012

Bachelor Thesis, 15 credits, C

Computer Science

Computer Science Program

Examiner: Peter Jenke
Supervisor: Julia hln

Face detection based on skin color

by
Yang Ling
Gu Xiaohan

Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development

University of Gvle

S-801 76 Gvle, Sweden

Email:
ofk09lyg@student.hig.se
ofk09xgu@student.hig.se

Abstract
This work is on a method for face detection through analysis of photos. Accurate
location of faces and point out the faces are implemented. In the first step, we use Cb
and Cr channel to find where the skin color parts are on the photo, then remove noise
which around the skin parts, finally, use morphology technique to detect face part
exactly. Our result shows this approach can detect faces and establish a good technical
based for future face recognition.
Key words: Face detection, Cb and Cr channel, Morphology technique, Accurate location

Contents
1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1
1.1 Aim3
1.2 Background...........................................................................................................................................3
1.3 Previous research .8
1.4 Delimitation8

2 Face detection ........................................................................................................... 9

2.1Color Space Transformation 10
2.2Skin Detection Based on Adaptive Histogram Segmentation .......................................................... 11
2.3Noise Reduction with Morphological Erosion and Dilation ............................................................. 12
2.4Shape Extraction of face candidates by Morphological Reconstruction.......................................... 13
2.5Checking face candidates based on Head-Shape Classifier ............................................................. 15

3 Results ..................................................................................................................... 17
3.1where photos from .17
3.2interfaceofthefacedetection..17
3.3The accurateness19

4 Discussions .............................................................................................................. 20
5 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 22
6 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 22
7 Reference ................................................................................................................ 23
8 Appendix...24

1. Introduction
In accordance with rapid population growth throughout the world, facial detection technology
plays a more significant and crucial role in our daily lives, namely in such aspects as criminal
investigations, login systems, entrance systems, etc. Face detection accuracy is influenced by
different variations in classifying a target object in an image; this may include pose variation and
facial occlusion. The challenges of face detection will be discussed in later sections of this chapter.
The following factors explain the importance of face detection:
1. Facial recognition: Facial recognition entails identification and verification of people. These
are mainly considered for security measures.
2. Human computer interactions: Human computer interaction is the study of interaction
between humans and computers. It is important for increasing the user-machine
experience/interaction; as a result an intelligent human computer interaction system is
established. For example, facial expression recognition can help disabled people.
3. Facial expression recognition: This technique figures out the meaning of expressions from
detected people.
This is the definition of face detection: the system acquires an arbitrary image, and it can analyze
the messages included in the image accurately, and determine the exact position and region of
the face [1]. Face detection can detect whether or not a human face exists on the image, and if it
does, then the numbers and positions of the human face/s on the image can be determined.
Like these two figures below.

Figure1: One face

Figure2: Many faces
Human face detection is one of the most important steps in face recognition. It is directly bound
up with the detection effect. But because of the complexity of the different background in most
cases, changeable angle will affect the face detection result and other factors will affect the
result [1].
Now face detection and facial feature extraction have attracted a lot of attention in human
interaction with the machine. It also provides a way to communicate between a human and a
machine.
Detecting faces and facial parts in images has become more and more popular in the human
computer interface area. For example, access control system is in extensive use in our modern
life. Face verification, matching a face against a single enrolled exemplar, is well within the
capabilities of current Personal Computer hardware. Since PC cameras have become widespread,
their use for face-based PC-login has become feasible, though take-up seems to be very limited.
Increased ease-of-use over password protection is hard to argue with todays unreliable systems,
and their potential to progress beyond the combinations of password and physical security that

protects most enterprise computers. Naturally, such PC-based verification systems can be
extended to control authorization for single-sign-in to multiple networked services, for access to
encrypted documents and transaction authorization, though again uptake of the technology has
been slow.
Banks have been very conservative in deploying biometrics as they risk losing far more through
customers disaffected by being falsely rejected than they might gain in fraud prevention.
Customers are unwilling to bear the burden of additional security measures, their personal
responsibility has to be restricted by law. For better acceptance, robust passive acquisition
systems with very low false rejection probabilities are necessary. Physical access control is
another domain where face recognition is attractive and here it can even be used in combination
with other biometrics. BioId [2] is a system which combines face recognition with speaker
identification and lip motion.
Also Identification System is an application in face detection. Two US States (Massachusetts and
Connecticut [3]) are testing face recognition for the policing of Welfare benefits. This is an
identification task, where any new applicant being enrolled must be compared against the entire
database of previously enrolled claimants, to ensure that they are not claiming under more than
one identity. Unfortunately face recognition is not currently able to reliably identify one person
among the millions enrolled in a single states database, so demographics (zip code, age, name
etc.) are used to narrow the search (thus limiting its effectiveness), and human intervention is
required to review the false alarms that such a system will produce. Here a more accurate system
such as fingerprint or iris-based person recognition is more technologically appropriate, but face
recognition is chosen because it is more acceptable and less intrusive. In Connecticut, face
recognition is the secondary biometric added to an existing fingerprint identification system.
Several US States, including Illinois, have also instituted face recognition for ensuring that people
do not obtain multiple driving licenses.
Face recognition has attracted more and more attention in recent years. Especially face detection
is an important part of face recognition as the first step, but face detection is not straightforward,
because it has many variations of image appearance, such as pose variation (front, non-front),
illuminating condition and facial expression and so on. There are many different algorithms that
have been implemented for face detection, including the use of color information, edge
detection, and neural networks [4].
Face detection technology has been developed over the years. With the hardware and software
improved the accuracy of the detection is getting better and better. However, the accuracy still
cannot meet all the requirements. There are many influencing factors when you detect faces
from an image, e.g., the brightness and background. You may detect some parts of the image
that may not belong to the face or even fail to detect any face at all. The face detection is not a
simple process. It is easy for humans to find by their eyes but not easy for a computer to do so.
In our thesis, we would like to conduct face detection in multi face field. At the same time, the
image processing technology has matured. In this section, we will describe the theoretical
background of this study needed to perform this task.

1.1 Aim
The goal of our thesis is to create a new application that uses the MATLAB software to achieve
human facial information detection, finding the human facial area in the input image. Our
research problem: Is it possible to recognize face accurately from a picture that contains more
than 3 people?

1.2 Background
Recently, there has been a lot of research on face detection in modern life. Normally, face
detection is divided into five parts: input image, image pretreatment, face location, background
separation, and face detection.

1.2.1 Grayscale conversion

To reduce image information, images should be converted to grayscale. Each color image from
the three given channels show red, green and blue components in RGB color scheme. Below is an
example to give a general idea of the RGB color image as figure 3 shows below.

Figure3 [18]: Transfer of RGB to gray

An image is defined by a grayscale level, which means pixels in images are stored in 8 bit integer
to represent color from black to white[5].

1.2.2 Image resizing

Image scaling refers to the process of adjustment of the size of the digital image. The image
scaling is a non-trivial process that requires a trade-off in processing efficiency as well as the
results of the smoothness and clarity. Increase the size of an image, the visibility of the pixels of
the image will be higher. Conversely, shrinking an image will enhance its smoothness and clarity.

Figure 4:The top left side of each image is resolution of each one. Left side image is the original.

An image 3000 pixels in width and 2000 pixels in height, means it has 3000 x 2000 = 6000000
pixels or 6 megapixels. If the image has been resized into 1000 pixels in width and 600 pixels in
height, image only has been 0.6 megapixels.

1.2.3 Histogram Equalization

Histogram equalization [7] is a statistical method of image processing. Histogram equalization is a
method of contrast adjustment using histogram. The ideal is present as a follows:

Figure 5The changes of the histogram after perform histogram equalization.

In the above chart, the shape of a graph has been widened which is the meaning of average
scatter in the histogram.
This method usually increases the contrast of the input image. On the left hand side of Figure 6 is
a resized grayscale image. The other is an output image after the processing of histogram
equalization. There is a significant difference in the end result.

Figure 6 [19]: Example of the process of histogram equalization.

1.2.4 YCbCr image scale

YCbCr [9] is a color coding scheme, commonly used in DVD, video cameras, digital TV and other
consumer video products. Y is the luminance component, Cb refers to blue chrominance
components, and Cr refers to the red chrominance components. The human eye is more sensitive

to the Y component in video. The human eye will not detect the changes in image quality after
the sub sampling of the chrominance components. The main sub-sampling formats are YCbCr
4:2:0, YCbCr 4:2:2 andYCbCr 4:4:4.
On the other hand, the formula which we used is RGB conversion formula for YCbCr below:

Function-conversion is YCBCR=rgb2ycbcr (RGB).

1.2.5 Morphological Image Processing

We understand mathematical morphology as a tool for extracting image component that are
useful in the representation and description of region shape, such as boundaries, skeletons, etc.
We are also interested in morphological techniques for pre- and post-processing, such as
morphological filtering, thinning, and pruning. Object image recognition can be a very difficult
task. Sometimes, there is no effective way to find the object based on pixel intensity values.
However, if identifying the different characteristics of the object, we can use the shape of the
object, shape recognition based on the strength of the binary image. Therefore, in order to
simplify the problem one has to change the gray image into a binary image, each pixel value of 0
or 1. For a binary image, there are four basic operations. Dilation is an Operation making objects
larger. The objects are larger with half the size of the structuring element. If A is some rectangular
object in the image and B is the structuring element the yellow area shows how much A have
grown
in
size
by
the
dilation
process.

Figure 7: Dilation process

And erosion is making objects smaller. The objects are smaller with half the size of the structuring
element. If A is some rectangular object in the image and B is the structuring element the yellow
area shows how much A have shrunk in size by the erosion process.

Figure 8: Erosion process

Opening operation is erosion followed by the dilation and closing operation is erosion followed
by the dilation.

Figure 9: The four basic morphological operations for binary image processing
As you can see in Figure9 (b) is making objects larger. The objects are larger with half the size of
the structuring element. Figure9 (c) is making objects defined by shape in the structuring
element smaller. The objects are smaller with half the size of the structuring element. The
Figure9 (d) and Figure9 (e) show the two derivational operations from the Erosion and Dilation.
Opening is defined as an erosion followed by dilation and closing is defined as dilation followed
by erosion.

1.2.6 Remove noise

Open operation is first erosion then dilation, the result of the open operation will smooth image
contour, eliminating the image edge and cut off the narrow valley. As shown in equation 2.
Operations are defined A B A ( B) z | ( B) z A

(2)

Close operation is firstly executed dilation then erosion; it can also smooth the edge of the image
and fill the small holds in the image or connecting adjacent objects. Contrary to the open
operation, it can generally integrate the narrow gap, remove the small holes and fill the gaps on
the contour. As shown in equation 3.
Operations are defined A B ( A B) B

(3)

1.2.7 Binary image

Widely used in a variety of industrial and medical application binary images is the simplest type
of binary, black and white or silhouette images. It has only two possible intensity values: 1 and 0.
0 is usually represented by black and 1 by white like the figure 10 shown below.

(a)Original image

(b) Gray scale image

(c) Binary image

Figure 10 [20]: Pictures in different model

1.3 Previous research

From previous research, face detection system has been developed since the early 1970s [10].
Due to limitations of computation, systems could not satisfy the requirements of users, such as
real time identification of passport photos. Paul Viola and Michael Jones proposed a method for
face detection depend on AdaBoost algorithm in 2001 [11]. The algorithm can greatly increase
the speed and accuracy of face detection and it can turn face detection from theory to practice
(reality). But the algorithm only uses the gray feature of human face, which is over-fitting and
time-consuming in the training process and detection. But Zhengming Li, LijieXue and FeiTan[12]
increased the algorithm and made the program more efficient. First, it segments the regions of
skin color and obtains the candidates face regions. Then take these regions as input images of
the AdaBoost cascade classifier which is trained already. After scanning and detection, it can
localize the face region accurately. The main idea of this method is to eliminate the majority
background by skin color range and reduce the cascade classifier's search zone as well as the
detection time. Thus error is cut down whilst as many as possible face regions could be detected.
The reason why we do not use AdaBoost method is that the usage speed is very low; the
calculation is too complex for the user and inefficient. On the other hand, Ming Hu and Qiang
Zhang [13] created a different method of face detection as we describe below. In their paper,
they proposed a new pre-processing method for face detection based on rough sets. They
segment sub-image using indiscernibility relation of condition attributes, and reduce noises. The
experiment shows that the enhanced algorithm can obtain a better enhancement effect and lay a
good foundation for face detection and recognition. In the last article which we have searched,
Fcenret et.al [16] studied visual selection: Detect and roughly localize all instances of a generic
object class, such as a face, in a grey scale scene, measuring performance in terms of
computation and false alarms. Their approach is sequential testing which is coarse-to-fine in both
in the exploration of poses and the representation of objects. All the tests are binary and indicate
the presence or absence of loose spatial arrangements of oriented edge fragments.

1.3.1 AdaBoost
7

Adaboost [8] is an iterative algorithm. The core idea of Adaboost is to train different weak
classifiers depend on the same training set, and then combine them together, in order to make a
stronger classifier. The algorithm itself is basically changing the data distribution, it determine the
weights of each sample value according to the accuracy of classification of each samples, and the
last overall classification accuracy. Then give the modified weights to lower classifier for the
purpose of classification. Finally, mix all the classifiers together, as the final decision classifier. To
use the Adaboost classifier can exclude unnecessary training data characteristics. The algorithm is
a simple promotion process of weak classification algorithm. This process is by way of continuous
training
to
improve
the
ability
of
data
classification.

Figure 11 [21] : Adaboost Schematic diagram

1.3.2 Rough set

Rough set [14] is a formal approximation of a crisp set in terms of a pair of sets which give the
lower and the upper approximation of the original set. It is the tools of probability theory, fuzzy
sets, evidence theory, after a processing of uncertainty. As a relatively new soft computing
method, rough sets in recent years have had more and more attention, its effectiveness has been
confirmed in the successful application in many scientific and engineering fields, and it is the
current international artificial intelligence theory.

1.4 Delimitation
The following items are the summary of the main delimitation in face detection:
1. Illumination condition: different lighting and the quality of camera directly affect the quality of
the face. Sometimes it can be varied greater than facial expression and occlusion.
2. Occlusion: face detection not only deals with different faces, however, it also needs to deal
with any optional object. For example, hairstyle, sunglasses are all the occlusion in face detection.
The long hair and the sunglasses will cover the faces making the detection harder, because the
non-face object will affect the process of skin detection.
3. Uncontrolled background: face detection system can not only detect faces on simple
environment. In reality, people are always located on complex background with different texture

and object. These things are the major factors to affect the performance of face detection
system.
About our program, the limitation is the distance between person and camera, which should not
be a big range, distance, must be appropriate for our program. Otherwise, our application cannot
detect faces from photos.

2. Face Detection Algorithm

An overview of our face detection algorithm is depicted in Fig.10, which contains two major
modules:
1) Face localization for finding face candidates;
2) Face verification based on head shape model.
The algorithm first transforms the RGB color images into YCbCr color space. The skin-tone pixels
are detected using a skin model in CbCr subspace under the assumption of Gaussian distribution
of skin tone color. In the test image, each pixel is classified by distribution of the face /
background. Then some morphological techniques are applied to reduce noise, fill holds and
reconstruct the shape of skin like regions. Finally, for verification, a frontal head shape models is
compared with the extracted skin-like regions. If the proportion of a skin region in an enclosed
rectangle is larger than a user specified threshold, the detected region is classified as a face.

Figure 12: The general flow of our face detection algorithm

Next, we will demonstrate our face detection algorithm with a color image of size 368x314 pixels
as shown in Figure 13(a). Face in the picture you can see 5 frontal people, and the brightness is
normal in the morning, the distance between people and camera is 2 meters long.

2.1 Color Space Transformation

In order to locate the candidate facial regions, you need to model the skin color which requires
choosing an appropriate color space at first. Several color spaces have been utilized to label pixels
as skin including RGB, normalized RGB, HSV (or HSI), and YCrCb.
Although the RGB color space matches nicely with the fact that the human eye is strongly
perceptive to red, green, and blue primaries, unfortunately it and other similar color models
(such as CMY, CMYK etc.) are not well suited for describing colors in variant illumination
environments.
The HSV and YCbCr do not suffer from such problems.
However, in the HSV color space, the skin tones range from 0 - 60 and 300 - 360 , including
the extra computation, RGB to HSV conversion. So, in this paper, we adopt YCbCr color space for
skin color filtering, and the reasons are summarized as follows.
1) By decoupling the color information into intensity and chromaticity components, YCbCr
Color Space allows us to omit the intensity components and use only chromaticity descriptors
for skin detection, which can provide robustness against changing intensity.
2) Based on Terrillons comparison of nine different color spaces for face detection, the YCbCr
color space is similar to the TSL (Tint, Saturation, and Luminance) [17] space in terms of the
separation of luminance and chrominance as well as the compactness of the skin cluster, which
is very attractive for face skin detection.
Figure 13 gives an example of RGB-YCbCr conversation. For the given RGB color image in Figure13
(a), we can obtain the derived YCbCr color image and the 3 component images as shown in
Figure13 (b)-13(d) via a transformation from RGB to YCbCr color space.

(a)

(b)

10

(b)
(d)
(e)
Figure 13: The result of the first step. (a) RGB Color Image; (b) The derived YCbCr image;
(c) Y component of (b); (d) Cb component of (b); (e) Cr component of (b).

2.2 Skin Detection Based on Adaptive Histogram Segmentation

Many research studies show that the chrominance components of the skin-tone color are
independent of the luminance component. In this paper, we omit the intensity component Y and
detect skin tone only based on the compactness of the skin cluster in the CbCr subspace.
We are going to create a skin detection method based on color histograms to segment skin
regions from a cluttered background, which performs skin/non-skin classification using a mixture
of Gaussians obtained from Cb and Cr color histograms. The motivation for using a mixture of
Gaussians is based on the assumption of Gaussian distribution of skin tone color and the
observation that background pixels have the same depth and outnumber the pixels in the
foreground regions .As shown in Figure 14(a) that is the Cb histogram of the YCbCr image in
Figure 14(b), which typically exhibits 2 prominent peaks. The uppermost peak in the right
corresponds to the background pixels, while the second highest peak in the left corresponds to
the foreground regions, including skin regions. Based on the peak value and its width, adaptive
threshold values [Cr1, Cr2] and [Cb1, Cb2] can be selected as the intersections of probability
distribution functions in a mixture of Gaussians whose parameters can be estimated using an EM
algorithm. Then all pixels can be classified to have skin tone if its values (Cr, Cb) fall within the
ranges, i.e.
and
. Figure 14(b) &Figure 14(e) illustrates the CbCr
color range that's used for threshold: the Cb lower threshold (
=107) is at the bottom and the
upper threshold (
=122) is at the top; the Cr lower threshold ( =138) is left and the upper
threshold ( =151) is right. The segmented results of Cb and Cr components with adaptive
histogram segmentation are shown in Figure 14(c) &Figure 14(f).

(a)

(b)

(c)

11

(d)
(e)
(f)
Figure 14: Skin color detection based on adaptive histogram segmentation.
(a)Histogram of Cb component image, (b)Cb color range[107, 122].
(c)The segment image of Cb component. (d) Histogram of Cr component image.
(e)Cr color range [138, 151]. (f)The segment image of Cr component.
The combination of image segmentation, and then evaluated to determine whether and where
the face is there. This results in a binary black & white image shown in Figure 15 and we can find
that the mask image covers most skin color ranges.

Figure 15: Result of the 2th step is a skin color filtered binary image: segmented skin regions

2.3 Noise Reduction with Morphological Erosion and Dilation

The skin color-filtered image contains tiny pixel areas or image noise from the background or the
clothes color which are similar to the skin. The image noise can prevent a clear split in a later step,
so we have to remove it. As a result of the previous step to produce the black and white images,
we can use a simple binary erosion operator to reduce the noise. At the same time, considering
that erosion operation will shrink the face region which causes some holes, we can use the
following morphological operator to fill holes and enlarge the face regions.
Let f be an image of size m x n, for a given pixel (x,y) in image f, as you can see in equation 4 :

1 f ( x, y), if
f o ( x, y )
0

Ishole( x, y ) 1
others

(4)

Where is hole(x,y)=1 means the pixel point (x,y) lies in a hole which is an area of dark pixels
surrounded by lighter pixels. In Figure 16, an example is given to demonstrate the operation
above, in which Figure 16(a) is reduced noise image of Figure 16 by using a morphological erosion
and dilation with 3 x 3 structural elements, and Figure 16(b) is the result of filling holes.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 16: Result of the third step

(a) The reduced noise image, (b) The image after hole-filling

2.4 Shape Extraction of face candidates by Morphological Reconstruction

Morphological reconstruction is a powerful transformation of digital image processing that
involves two images and a structuring element. One image, the marker, contains the starting
points for the transformation and the other image, the mask, constraints the transformation. The
structuring element is used to define connectivity. For the application of morphological
reconstruction, it is important to determine the marker image and the structuring element used.
In this paper, an open operation method is used to reconstruct the shape of faces detected.
Considering the accuracy of this restoration is highly dependent of the similarity of the shapes of
face areas and the structuring element used, we use an 87 pixels structuring element (Figure 17)
of 1s as follows, which can approximately depict the shape of human faces.

Figure 17: An 87pixels Structuring element

At the same time, considering that opening by reconstruction requires at least one erosion, we
take the erosion of mask image with the structuring element B as the marker in which small areas
that are non-faces are removed and the subsequent dilation attempts to restore the shape of the
candidate face areas.
Let F denote the marker image, G the mask image. The open-by-reconstruction of a marker
image F with respect to the specified mask G and structuring element B, denoted by RG(F) with
FG, can be described as follows, where denotes the erosion operation and U denotes set
union (or OR operation).

13

RG(0) ( F ) F ;

1) K=0;
2) Do
a)

K=k+1;

b)

k 1

3) Until RG ( F ) RG ( F );
(k )

Take the image shown in Figure 18(a) as examples. Notes that Figure 18(a) is the mask image G
and Figure 18(b) is the marker image F, i.e. the erosion of Figure 18(a) with the structuring
element B. Figure 18(c) is the opening by reconstruction of F with respect to G. For the purpose
of comparison, we computed the opening of the mask image G using the same structuring
element B, as shown in Figure 18(d). The result in Figure 18(c) shows that the face candidate
areas were restored accurately, and all other non-face small areas were removed.

Figure 18: The result of the fourth step.

(a) The mask image of size 368 x 314 pixels;
(b) The marker image, also the erosion of (a) with the structuring element B in Figure 18;
(c) Result of opening by reconstruction;
(d) Opening of (a) with the same structuring element, shown for comparison.

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2.5 Checking face candidates based on Head-Shape Classifier

Considering that the shape of face candidates extracted by morphological construction may be
irregular, in this paper, we introduce a frontal head shape model shown in Figure 19 to build a
classifier for verifying the face regions.

Figure19: Tead shape model

The shape model is a 2D rectangle consisting of w x h cells where w is width of rectangle
enclosing face candidate and h is height. Let be S =w * h the area of rectangle and S* be area of
skin regions which is marked with gray, the rule based classifier can be described as a decision
tree as shown in Figure 20, including two rules as follows.
1) For a normal frontal human face, w should be less than h and the ratio h/w usually is
less than 2. So if the ratio h/w of a skin range is between 1 and 2, we should classify it as a
face region. Otherwise, ratio too large or too small should be classified as a non-face region.
2) Considering the ellipse-like shape of a human face, the ratio S*/ S should between 0.6 and
/4, so if ratio S*/ S of a skin region is between 0.6 and /4, we should classify it as a face
region. Otherwise, too large or too small should be classified as a non-face region.

15

Figure 20: The decision tree of head shape classifier

Figure 21: Image after reconstruction

To illustrate how the classifier works, consider the 7 skin regions in Figure 21, the region in green
circle is classified as non-face because it does not meet the requirement of ratio h / w, and the
region in blue circle is classified as non-face because it does not meet the requirement of ration
S*/ S. The final result of face detection in Figure 13 (a) is shown in the Figure 22. Obviously, the
proposed face detection algorithm can detect correctly all five faces in this test image.

16

Figure 22: Final result of face detection algorithm.

3. Results
3.1 Where are the photos come from?
We selected 10 pictures in order to test our program. The first one contains two people with no
glasses on and they both have short hair. The second one has 5 people on the photo, three of
them have glasses, and the background is white. The third one contains three people, one of
them wearing glasses, and the background is an outdoor environment. The fourth has 3 people
on the photo, none wearing glasses, and their hair is short. The fifth has 6 people on the image
and detecting all of them may be difficult; some part of the background is affected by the sun.
The sixth shows 3 people on the photo; one of them wearing sunglasses which will have more
effects than normal glasses. The seventh displays 5 people on the photo, some of them have long
hair. In the eighth photo, there are 7 people; all of them have short hair, it will be easier to detect.
The ninth has 2 people on the picture, I think they are in a forest, and detecting two people may
not be as difficult. The tenth is our exemplary picture, containing all of the information about a
model photo we have introduced above. All the images are almost at the same distance from
camera.
3.2 The interface of the face detection
In this part we are going to introduce the interface of the detection program.
1 Select a photo to detect

17

Figure 23: This is the first step that you should choose a photo to detect
2 click open button to input the photos. The results are shows in Figure 24 below:

Figure 24: The results after you click the open button
The number: 5 represent the face number, and all the faces are marked by white circles as Figure
25 shows:

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Figure 25: Faces marked by white circles

3.3 The accurateness
Our program accuracy is good enough, but it also has some problems caused by different
conditions. Here is a table which shows the details of the face detection results.

More than

Quantity

Success

Error

Accuracy

80

10

100

75

50

10

70

3 faces
Background 10
is difficult
Dont have
collar
Have
glasses
In total

This table shows the detail information of FD accuracy.

As shown in table above, the highest accuracy is the treatment of complex background. Because

19

our program is not affected by the background, because the skin color is totally different from the
background color; we delete the background part in 2.2 Skin Detection. And we can also ignore
the effects of glasses, but other parts are not as good as the first two parts we have introduced.
Those with more than 3 faces, have the accuracy rate at 80 percent. The lowest percentage is
seen in collar part, with a percentage of 75.

4. Discussions
In our program processing, we personally searched the database that we used, which included 10
test images. Depend on our program, the most detection is accurate, but there are also some
images that cannot be detected correctly, here are some examples:
The next task is to try to find out where the error occurred then identify images and analysis
results.

Figure 26: The wrong detection

1 In this image (Figure 26). The detection is not correct enough, there are probably two reasons
for this wrong detection, firstly, and the person in the middle is wearing clothes without a collar,
so the program detects her neck as a new face. And the man on the left corner, I think the reason
why the program cannot detect his face is the light; light around him is brighter than others. So
the brightness affects the process of detection. The failed reason dependent on the code part is
our program is classify faces depend on skin colors, the people on the left corner which cannot
be detected is because his skin color is not the same as other on this photo, so it is hard to detect
his face with others.

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Figure 27: The wrong detection

2 In this image (Figure 27).The woman on the right cannot be detect because her sunglasses, the
glasses are in the middle of her face, they divide her face into two parts, so the binary image of
her face is not big enough to be recognized as part of the face. This reason leads to the failure of
face detection. As we know, the glasses is black in the photo, so it will affect the face area, our
program defined too small or too big part as non-face area, so the woman wears a glasses will be
skipped.

Figure 28: The wrong detection

3 In the image above (Figure 28), the detection of the second person on the right is not exactly,

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the circle include her hair and face, the reason is her hair color is similar as her skin color, so our
program detect her hair as part of the face, and the first and second woman on the left are also
not detected correctly, the reason is also about skin color and hair color. Our program divides the
background and faces by color, so it will be a limitation.
However, our project aim is limited, although there are some incidents as shown above, this
program can detect correctly in most images taken by the cameras at the middle distance. This is
the biggest limitation of our program, the reason is: I classify the faces depend on the size of the
skin color part, it will be a standard pixel size of our classifier which is 8x7 pixels head size, it is a
experienced value, so if the distance is too long or too short, the faces size will be too small or
too big, then the system will mistake them as noise to remove. The 8x7 pixel standard face size is
an experienced value. We defined it after training a large amount of times. This is also the most
important drawbacks for our program.

5. Conclusions
In short, this paper described a program which can detect faces from 8 X 7 pixels head size
photos using image process. The program can not only detect single face photo but also can
detect multi face photo correctly. Therefore, our research problem is almost successful
accomplished (see Chapter 1.4). Clearly, we have almost reached our research question; although
the distance should be appropriate, we can change the threshold number to detect person in
different distance. We can use our program to detect multi face photos more than three person,
at the same time, if a photo has only one or two person, our program can also detect them out,
so we have solved our problem correctly.

6. Acknowledgements
This work would not have been finished without the help of our supervisor Julia. Her input is
greatly appreciated, thank you.

7. Reference:
1 C.feng, Quwang, Yunming Du. Face Detection Based on Membership and Geometry Feature,
Journal, Information Technology, Harbin, 2007, 31(8), pp.84-87.
2 http://www.bioid.com/index.php?q=downloads/software/bioid-face-database.html accessed
2013.01.13.
3 http://wenku.baidu.com/view/3f5c70946bec0975f465e225.htm accessed 2013.01.13
4 Y. Ming Detecting Human Faces in Color Images from Beckman Institute and Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering 2009 15th.
5 Z. ming Li; Li jieXue; Fei Tan; , "Face detection in complex background based on skin color
features and improved AdaBoost algorithms," Dec. 2010.
6 Prakash, C.; Gangashetty, S.V.; , "Bessel transform for image resizing," Systems, Signals and
Image Processing (IWSSIP), 2011 18th International Conference on , pp.1-4, 16-18 June 2011

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7 J-Youn Kim; Lee-Sup Kim; Seung-Ho Hwang; , Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE
Transactions on "An advanced contrast enhancement using partially overlapped sub-block
histogram equalization,", pp.475-484, Apr 2001
8 X Jin; XinwenHou; Cheng-Lin Liu; , "Multi-class AdaBoost with Hypothesis Margin," Pattern
Recognition (ICPR), pp.65-68, 23-26 Aug. 2010
9 YCbCr Color Space, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YCbCr accessed 2013.01.13
10 An introduction to face detection technology. http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol3/v3n1p01-07.pdf
accessed 2013.01.13
11 P. Viola and M. Jones, "Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features,"
Proceedings of IEEE Conference on ComputerVision and Pattern Recognition. May 2004
12 Glossary Grayscale Image, http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/gryimage.htm, accessed
2013.01.13
13 M. Hu; Qiang Zhang; Zhiping Wang; , "Application of rough sets to image pre-processing for
Face detection," Information and Automation, 2008. ICIA 2008, pp.545-548, 20-23 June 2008
14 Meghabghab, G "Fuzzy Rough Sets as a Pair of Fuzzy Numbers: A New Approach and New
Findings," Fuzzy Information Processing Society, 2006. NAFIPS 2006. Annual meeting of the
North American, pp.46-51, 3-6 June 2006
15 Robert E. Schapire, Yoav Freund, Peter Bartlett, and Wee Sun Lee. Boosting the margin: A new
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International Conference on Machine Learning, 1997
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85107, 2001, 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Accepted
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17 Terrillon, Jean-Christophe; Akamatsu, Shigeru (2000), Comparative Performance of Different
Chrominance Spaces for Color Segmentation, International Conference on Face and Gesture
Recognition, pp. 5461, retrieved 2008-02-10
18 http://140.129.118.16/~richwang/ImageProcessing/DIPBeginning.html accessed 2013.01.13
19 http://haltair.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/histogram-equalization-part-i/ accessed
2013.01.13
20http://en.pudn.com/downloads91/sourcecode/graph/texture_mapping/detail347209_en.htm
l accessed 2013.01.13
21 http://baike.baidu.com/albums/2395336/2395336/0/0.html#0$8a95ad1caa0770b087d6b6e7
accessed 2013.01.13

8. Appendix
The other photos result are shown below

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24

25

26

All the detection results photos.

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