Towards a system for automatic facial feature detection

A model-based methodology is proposed to detect facial features from a front-view ID-type picture. The system is composed of three modules: context (i.e. face location), eye, and mouth. The context module is a low resolution module which defines a face template in terms of intensity valley regions. The valley regions are detected using morphological filtering and 8-connected blob coloring. The objective is to generate a list of hypothesized face locations ranked by face likelihood. The detailed analysis is left for the high resolution eye and mouth modules. The aim for both is to confirm as well as refine the locations and shapes of their respective features of interest. The detection is done via a two-step modelling approach based on the Hough transform and the deformable template technique. The results show that facial features can be located very quickly with Adequate or better fit in over 80% of the images with the proposed system.