Automatic facial feature extraction by genetic algorithms

An automatic facial feature extraction algorithm is presented. The algorithm is composed of two main stages: the face region estimation stage and the feature extraction stage. In the face region estimation stage, a second-chance region growing method is adopted to estimate the face region of a target image. In the feature extraction stage, genetic search algorithms are applied to extract the facial feature points within the face region. It is shown by simulation results that the proposed algorithm can automatically and exactly extract facial features with limited computational complexity.