Detecting human faces in color images

A method is introduced that detects human faces in color images by first separating skin regions from non-skin regions and then locating faces within the skin regions. A chroma chart is prepared via a training process that shows likelihoods of different colors representing the skin. Using the chroma chart, a color image is transformed into a gray-scale image, with the gray value at a pixel showing the likelihood of the pixel representing the skin. By segmenting the gray-scale image, skin regions are separated from non-skin regions. Then, using the luminance component of the color image and by template matching, faces are located within skin regions.