Face detection system design for real time high resolution smart camera

Recognizing faces in a crowd in real-time is a key feature which would significantly enhance intelligent surveillance systems. Using a smart camera as a tool to extract faces for recognition would greatly reduce the computational load on the main processing unit. Main processing unit would not be overloaded by the demands of the high data rates of the video and could be designed solely for face recognition. The challenge is with the increasing speed and resolution of the camera sensors, a fast and robust face detection system is required for real time operation. In this paper we report on a multiple-stage face detection system that is designed for implementation on an FPGA based high resolution smart camera system. The system consist of filter stages to greatly reduce the region of interest in video image, followed by a face detection stage to accurately locate the faces. For filter stage, the algorithm is designed to be very fast so that it can be processed in real time. Meanwhile, for face detection stage, a hardware and software co-design technique is utilised to accelerate it.