Face occlusion detection by using B-spline active contour and skin color information

This paper proposes a face occlusion verification method for an automated teller machine (ATM) application. The proposed method mainly consists of three steps. Firstly, a head and shoulder shape is detected by applying B-spline active contour to motion edges. This motion edge is generated by a kurtosis-based frame selection and distance transformation-based motion edge detection. Secondly, a face area is estimated by fitting an ellipse to the detected head and shoulder shape. Finally, occlusion of the face area is determined by measuring skin color area ratio (SCAR) of whole face area and facial component areas. Experimental results show that the proposed head and shoulder detection method has 94.8% detection rate even though there are various types of severe occlusions in faces, and the proposed occlusion verifier has 86.7% verification rate.