Passive single image-based approach for camera steering in face recognition at-a-distance applications

This paper investigates the problem of automatically steering one or more Narrow Field of View (NFOW) cameras to a target subject using only a single image from a reference NFOW camera, without the help of a Wide Field of View (WFOV) camera. To find the approximate distance of the subject from the reference camera, our algorithm uses information from facial biometrics, specifically the inter-pupil distance (IPD), and eye-to-lips distance(ELD). A trigonometric relationship is formulated to calculate the steering parameters of the other cameras. Moreover, a new robust facial feature detector is also proposed in order to estimate the required biometrics. Several experiments are reported to evaluate the proposed system.