An RGB-D Database Using Microsoft's Kinect for Windows for Face Detection

The very first step in many facial analysis systems is face detection. Though face detection has been studied for many years, there is not still a benchmark public database to be widely accepted among researchers for which both color and depth information are obtained by the same sensor. Most of the available 3d databases have already automatically or manually detected the face images and they are therefore mostly used for face recognition not detection. This paper purposes an RGB-D database containing 1581 images (and their depth counterparts) taken from 31 persons in 17 different poses and facial expressions using a Kinect device. The faces in the images are not extracted neither in the RGB images nor in the depth hereof, therefore they can be used for both detection and recognition. The proposed database has been used in a face detection algorithm which is based on the depth information of the images. The challenges and merits of the database have been highlighted through experimental results.