Face contour extraction with active shape models embedded knowledge

Face contour is an important feature of the human face and can be used for face indexing and retrieval. The key idea of face contour extraction here is to use the knowledge of the human face. We integrate the knowledge of the human face into the original active shape models (ASM) search. Due to the disturbance of hair, ears, eyes, mouth, or other noise, the face contour can not be exactly obtained by the original ASM method, so specific knowledge of the human face is employed in our method for more accurate face contour extraction. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches