Patent ID: 7508961

Claim:
A digital image processing method for detecting faces in a digital color image, said method comprising the steps of: providing a distributed face detection system having N complementary classifiers, wherein the classifiers are complementary in a frequency domain; selecting classifier parameters for the complementary classifiers from a plurality of different parameter generating sources, at least one of which is controllable by human input; reconfiguring the complementary classifiers in the distributed face detection system according to the selected classifier parameters, such that any desired combination of only M of the N complementary classifiers are involved in face detection, wherein M and N are integers, M is less than N, and M is greater than zero; and detecting faces using the M complementary classifiers in the distributed face detection system; wherein the step of providing a distributed face detection system having complementary classifiers comprises the steps of: constructing one or more classifiers having high execution speed and featuring operation in one portion of the frequency spectrum of the digital image, and constructing one or more classifiers having high accuracy and featuring operation in another portion of the frequency spectrum of the digital image; and wherein the step of constructing one or more classifiers having high accuracy and featuring operation in another portion of the frequency spectrum of the digital image comprises steps of: constructing a cascaded classifier, and constructing a Bayesian classifier.