Patent ID: 8363983

Claim:
A real-time face detection apparatus, comprising: a down-scaling unit for down-scaling an input image at at least two ratios into at least two down-scaled images; and a face region comparison unit for creating a plurality of windows for the at least two down-scaled images, acquiring face region confidence of each of window images within the created windows by comparing each of the window images with a classifier, and determining whether the window image corresponds to a face region, wherein the face region comparison unit receives two or more down-scaled images associated with different fractions of one clock cycle, and determines during the clock cycle whether the received two or more down-scaled images have face regions, wherein each of the different fractions of the clock cycle is associated with a corresponding one of the two or more down-scaled images based on the down-scale ratio of the down-scaled image, and wherein each of the received two or more down-scaled images is processed within the fraction of the clock cycle for each of the down-scaled images.