Face detection and its applications in intelligent and focused image retrieval

This paper presents a face detection technique and its applications in image retrieval. Even though this face detection method has relatively high false positives and a low detection rate (as compared with the dedicated face detection systems in the literature of image understanding), because of its simple and fast nature, it has been shown that this system may be well applied in image retrieval in certain focused application domains. Two application examples are given: one combining face detection with indexed collateral text for image retrieval regarding human beings, and the other combining face detection with conventional similarity matching techniques for image retrieval with similar background. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches have significantly improved image retrieval precision over existing search engines in these focused application domains.