Patent ID: 7783083

Claim:
An apparatus for detecting an occluded face, the apparatus comprising: a smoothing unit to smooth a facial region of an image to obtain a facial region robust to illuminating changes; a region division unit to divide the smoothed facial region into a first region and a second region; a first region detection unit to generate a first region detection result by detecting whether the first region is an occluded region; a second region detection unit to generate a second region detection result by detecting whether the second region is an occluded region; a decision unit to decide whether the facial region is an occluded face based on the first region detection result and the second region detection result; and an edge image generation unit generating an edge image of the facial region and providing the edge image to the smoothing unit, wherein the edge image generation unit determines a direction having a largest edge size calculated using gradient operators with respect to a plurality of directions as an edge direction at an arbitrary point.