Real-Time Viola-Jones Face Detection in a Web Browser

This paper develops optimizations to the Viola-Jones face detection method to make it suitable for use in a Web browser running on a standard laptop or a desktop equipped with a Web cam. In this setting certain assumptions can be made about the number and location of faces to find, and information from a previous frame can help to localize the search. These optimizations lead to an algorithm which performs real-time face detection using a slow scripting language, even on low-end computers. Specifically, we have implemented the algorithm in Adobe Flash (ActionScript 3.0) and our implementation can be deployed via a Web browser without any extra installation. We invite readers to click on http://flashfacedetection.com and test it for themselves.