Face detection and eyes extraction using sobel edge detection and morphological operations

Face detection and eyes extraction has an important role in many applications such as face recognition, facial expression analysis, security login etc. Detection of human face and facial structures like eyes, nose are the complex procedure for the computer. This paper proposes an algorithm for face detection and eyes extraction from frontal face images using Sobel edge detection and morphological operations. The proposed approach is divided into three phases; preprocessing, identification of face region, and extraction of eyes. Resizing of images and gray scale image conversion is achieved in preprocessing. Face region identification is accomplished by Sobel edge detection and morphological operations. In the last phase, eyes are extracted from the face region with the help of morphological operations. The experiments are conducted on 120, 75, 40 images of IMM frontal face database, FEI face database and IMM face database respectively. The face detection accuracy is 100%, 100%, 97.50% and the eyes extraction accuracy rate is 92.50%, 90.66%, 92.50% respectively.