Collaborative acquisition of multi-view face images in real-time using a wireless camera network

In order to support real-time face recognition using a wireless camera network, we design a data acquisition service to quickly and reliably acquire face images of human subjects from multiple views and to simultaneously index each acquired image into its corresponding pose. In comparison with detection of frontal faces, the detection of non-frontal faces with unknown pose is a much more challenging problem that involves significant image processing. In this paper, we describe a collaborative approach in which multi-view camera geometry and inter-camera communication is utilized at run time to significantly reduce the required processing time. By doing so, we are able to achieve a high capture rate for both frontal and non-frontal faces and at the same time maintain a high detection accuracy. We implement our face acquisition system on a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor based embedded camera network and show that we can reliably acquire frontal faces at 11 fps and non-frontal faces at 10 fps on images captured at a resolution of 640 × 480 pixels.