Lc. Desilva et al., DETECTION AND TRACKING OF FACIAL FEATURES BY USING EDGE PIXEL COUNTING AND DEFORMABLE CIRCULAR TEMPLATE MATCHING, IEICE transactions on information and systems, E78D(9), 1995, pp. 1195-1207
In this paper face feature detection and tracking are discussed, using
methods called edge pixel counting and deformable circular template m
atching. Instead of utilizing color or gray scale information of the f
acial image, the proposed edge pixel counting method utilizes the edge
information to estimate the face Feature positions such as eyes, nose
and mouth, using a variable size face feature template, the initial s
ize of which is predetermined by using a facial image database. The me
thod is robust in the sense that the detection is possible with facial
images with different skin color and different facial orientations. S
ubsequently, by using a deformable circular template matching two iris
positions of the face are determined and are used in the edge pixel c
ounting, to track the features in the next frame. Although feature tra
cking using gray scale template matching often fails when inter frame
correlation around the feature areas are very low due to facial expres
sion change (such as, talking, smiling, eye blinking etc.), feature tr
acking using edge pixel counting can track facial features reliably. S
ome experimental results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed method.