Vision-based face understanding technologies and applications

When people communicate with each other directly (face to face), the role of the visual information is very essential, especially facial images which include the most important information. If artificial vision systems that can understand human faces are realized, they will enable machines to communicate with people more effectively. For this purpose, we have been continuing the research and development of vision-based face understanding technologies, such as face detection, facial feature point detection, face recognition, face tracking, encoding and transmission of facial motion, face situation estimation, gender and age estimation, etc. This paper introduces these technologies and their applications.