Adaptive technique for human face detection using HSV color space and neural networks

Human face detection has a wide area of applications in image processing. A new face detection technique is presented in this paper. The technique combines two methods for face detection to achieve better detection rates. The two methods are skin face detection using HSV color space and the back propagation neural networks. In the first module of the technique, we proposed a fast algorithm for detecting human faces in color images. The algorithm uses color histogram of HSV color space to detect skin regions. In the second module of the technique, the neural network only examined the face candidate regions instead of performing exhaustive search in every part of the test image, so we reduced the search space. In experiments on images, our technique has achieved high detection rates and low false positives due to the application of the new algorithm.