A colour face image database for benchmarking of automatic face detection algorithms

With increasing research in the area of face segmentation, new methods for detecting human faces automatically are being developed. However, less attention is being paid to the development of a standard face image database to evaluate these new algorithms. This paper recognizes the need for a colour face image database and creates such a database for direct benchmarking of automatic face detection algorithms. The database has two parts. Part one contains colour pictures of faces having a high degree of variability in scale, location, orientation, pose, facial expression and lighting conditions, while part two has manually segmented results for each of the images in part one of the database. This allows direct comparison of algorithms. These images are acquired from a wide variety of sources such as digital cameras, pictures scanned in from a photo-scanner and the World Wide Web. The database is intended for distribution to researchers. Details of the face database such as the development process and file information along with a common criterion for performance evaluation measures is also discussed in this paper.