Patent ID: 8290277

Claim:
A method for extracting a lip region of a face included in an image, the method comprising the steps of: setting at least a first region and a second region in the image including the face, wherein the first region is expected to include a nose region of the face and the second region is expected to include a left eye region and a right eye region; identifying contrast information of the first region; setting a threshold for binarization using the contrast information; binarizing the second region based on the threshold; setting a region in which a pixel having an identical binary value is continuously distributed within a predetermined number of ranges in the binarized image as an eye candidate object; extracting the left eye region and the right eye region from the eye candidate object based on geometric characteristics of the left eye region and the right eye region in the image; setting a lip candidate region with reference to the left eye region and the right eye region based on a distance between the left eye region and the right eye region, maximum and minimum estimated distances from a center point of the left eye region and the right eye region to the lip region, and maximum and minimum estimated widths of the lip region, wherein the lip candidate region is expected to include the lip region of the face; and extracting the lip region from the lip candidate region using one of using one of a histogram, contrast information and color information of the lip candidate region.