Hierarchical tracking of face, facial parts and their contours with PTZ camera

Since, at our laboratory, the basic configuration of the facial caricaturing system PICASSO has been constructed, it is strongly expected to get sufficient input image from a person who is naturally performing in front of the PICASSO camera system. From this viewpoint, we developed a face tracking PC system for capturing sufficient facial image especially in size by means of PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera collaborated with a fixed CCD camera. Irises are successfully recognized from the motion images captured from PTZ camera. These irises can be utilized to provide a key feature for realizing an automated facial recognizing system. In this system, a person performing naturally in pose and in facial expression within the scope of the fixed CCD camera can be stably tracked and the sufficient images in resolution of PTZ camera were successfully analyzed for iris recognition and facial parts extractions. This face tracking and face recognition system was characterized by a novel template replacement scheme among the successive image frames. Experimental results were also demonstrated in this paper. This system works well in a practical speed 6-9 fps on a usual PC connected to these cameras.