Jurgen Stauder

Human face detection for automatic classification and annotation of personal photo collections

The recent proliferation of digital images captured by digital cameras and, as a result, the users’ needs for automatic annotation tools to index huge multimedia databases arouse a renewed interest in face detection and recognition technologies. After a brief state-of-the-art, the paper details a model-based face detection algorithm for color images, based on skin color and face shape properties. We compare a stand-alone model-based approach with a hybrid approach in which this algorithm is used as a pre-processor to provide candidate faces to a supervised SVM classifier. Experimental results are presented and discussed on two databases of 250 and 689 pictures respectively. Application to a system to automatically annotate the photos of a personal collection is eventually discussed from the human factors point of view.