Detection of Facial Features in Scale-Space

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to the detection of facial features. A scale adapted Harris Corner detector is used to find interest points in scale-space. These points are described by the SIFT descriptor. Thus invariance with respect to image scale, rotation and illumination is obtained. Applying a Karhunen-Loeve transform reduces the dimensionality of the feature space. In the training process these features are clustered by the k-means algorithm, followed by a cluster analysis to find the most distinctive clusters, which represent facial features in feature space. Finally, a classifier based on the nearest neighbor approach is used to decide whether the features obtained from the interest points are facial features or not.