Patent ID: 8055029

Claim:
A method of detecting faces in an image stream using a digital image acquisition device comprising: receiving an acquired image from said image stream including one or more face regions; sub-sampling said acquired image at a specified resolution to provide a sub-sampled image; identifying one or more regions of said acquired image predominantly including skin tones; calculating a corresponding integral image for at least one of said skin tone regions of said sub-sampled acquired image; applying face detection to at least a portion of said integral image to provide a set of one or more candidate face regions each having a given size and a respective location; for a candidate face region associated with a previous image in said stream, enhancing the contrast of the luminance characteristics of the corresponding region of said acquired image; providing a quality measure for one of a candidate region of an image or said acquired image; and wherein said enhancing is responsive to said quality measure; and wherein said quality measure is based on one or more of a luminance of said candidate region or said acquired image; or a variance of said luminance of said candidate region or said acquired image; and wherein said identifying one or more regions of said acquired image predominantly including skin tones comprises applying one of a number of filters to define said one or more regions of said acquired image predominantly including skin tones, at least one of said filters including a restrictive skin filter and at least one of said filters including a relaxed skin filter; and applying said relaxed skin filter in response to said quality measure indicating that the quality of said one of a candidate region of an image or said acquired image is poor.