Combining Haar Feature and skin color based classifiers for face detection

This paper presents a hybrid method for face detection in color images. The well known Haar feature-based face detector developed by Viola and Jones (VJ), that has been designed for gray-scale images is combined with a skin-color filter, which provides complementary information in color images. The image is first passed through a Haar-Feature based face detector, which is adjusted such that it is operating at a point on its ROC curve that has a low number of missed faces but a high number of false detections. Then, using the proposed skin color post-filtering method many of these false detections can be eliminated easily. We also use a color compensation algorithm to reduce the effects of lighting. Our experimental results on the Bao color face database show that the proposed method is superior to the original VJ algorithm and also to other skin color based pre-filtering methods in the literature in terms of precision.