A hardware-efficient color segmentation algorithm for face detection

This paper develops a hardware-efficient color segmentation algorithm that is especially suitable to implement on hardware for face detection. Since the modulized design is adopted in the proposed algorithm without floating-point operation, the computational cost is directly reduced for hardware design. The proposed algorithm consists of a color space modeling module and a feature enhancement module. The significant skin/lip color features distribution can be accurately detected by using our proposed algorithm to facilitate the face detection. The proposed algorithm was implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) system for verifying its efficiency. Compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm can significantly decrease the computational cost of the hardware implementation by using color segmentation instead of the overall analysis of the color distribution. Experimental results have verified that our proposed FPGA system occupies only 3,202 logic cells, or about five times less than the current comparable FPGA system with better detection rate.