Patent ID: 6263113
Filing Date: 2001-07-17
Classification: G06K

Abstract:
A method for detecting a face disposed within a digital image, comprising the steps of:providing a digital image composed of a plurality of pixels;providing a binary image from the digital image by detecting skin colored pixels;removing pixels corresponding to edges in the luminance component of said binary image thereby producing binary image components;mapping said binary image components into at least one graph; andclassifying said mapped binary image components as facial and non-facial types wherein the facial types serve as facial candidates,further comprising the step of applying a heuristic, said heuristic including in the following steps:applying a morphological closing operation on each of said facial candidates to produce at least one closed facial candidate;determining high variance pixels in said closed facial candidate;determining the ratio between said high variance pixels and the total number of pixels in said closed facial candidate; andcomparing said ratio to a threshold.