Morphology-based front-view facial contour detection

A new approach for detecting front-view facial contour is described. A novel contribution is to eliminate the ears and neck from the segmented face region by using morphological operations and knowledge about the face structure. Some consistent rules are derived from studying a large number of cases to locate some contour points from the skeleton of the skin-color segmented frontal face region. We extend our previous work (J.G. Wang and E. Sung, 1999), to solving face contour detection of tilted faces as well. The face contour can then be fitted as an ellipse using these points. The least inertia axis of the facial region is used as symmetry axis of the facial region that guarantees the facial contour can also be detected from a tilted face image. Experiments have been done with a number of images of a frontal view of the head including some with a slight pan obtained from an Internet face database. Also, a number of face images captured by a color CCD camera are tried using our method. The robustness is confirmed with a correct detection rate of over 94%