Face and facial feature extraction from color image

This paper presents an automatic processing of human face from color images. The system works hierarchically from detecting the position of human face and its features (such as eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) to contours and feature points extraction. The position of human face and its parts are detected from the image by applying the integral projection method, which synthesize the color information (skin and hair color) and the edge information (intensity and sign). In order to extract the contour-line of face features we used a multiple active contour model with color information based energy terms. Facial feature points are decided based on the optimized contours. The proposed system is confirmed to be very effective and robust to deal with the image of faces in the complex background.