It is evident that the process of face recognition, by definition, should be based on the content of a face. The problem is: what is a "face"? Recently, a state-of-the-art statistics-based face recognition system, the PCA plus LDA approach, has been proposed [1]. However, the authors used "face" images that included hair, shoulders, face and background. Our intuition tells us that only a recognition process based on a "pure" face portion can be called face recognition. The mixture of irrelevant data may result in an incorrect set of decision boundaries. In this paper, we propose a statistics-based technique to quantitatively prove our assertion. For the purpose of evaluating how the different portions of a face image will influence the recognition results, a hypothesis testing model is proposed. We then implement the above mentioned face ...

A new head tracking algorithm for automatically detecting and tracking human heads in complex backgrounds is proposed. By using an elliptical model for the human head, our Maximum Likelihood (ML) head detector can reliably locate human heads in images having complex backgrounds and is relatively insensitive to illumination and rotation of the human heads. Our head detector consists of two channels: the horizontal and the vertical channels. Each channel is implemented by multiscale template matching. Using a hierarchical structure in implementing our head detector, the execution time for detecting the human heads in a 512 × 512 image is about 0.02 second in a Sparc 20 workstation (not including the time for image acquisition). Based on the ellipse-based ML head detector, we have developed a head tracking method that can monitor the entrance of a person, detect and track the person’s head, and then control the stereo cameras to focus their gaze on this person’s head. In this method, the ML head detector and the mutually-supported constraint are used to extract the corresponding ellipses in a stereo image pair. To implement a practical and reliable face detection and tracking system, further verification using facial features, such as eyes, mouth and nostrils, may be essential. The 3D position computed from the centers of the two corresponding ellipses is then used for fixation. An active stereo head has been used to perform the experiments and has demonstrated that the proposed approach is feasible and promising for practical uses.

Face recognition, by definition, should be a recognition process in which recognition is based on the content of a face. The problem is: what is a "face"? Goudail et al. [1] and Swets and Weng [2] have recently proposed state-of-the-art statistics-based face recognition systems. However, they used "face" images that included hair, shoulders, face and background. Our intuition tells us that only a recognition process based on a "pure" face portion can be called face recognition. The mixture of irrelevant data may result in an incorrect set of decision boundaries. In this paper, we propose a statisticsbased technique to quantitatively prove our assertion. For the purpose of evaluating how the different portions of a face image will influence the recognition results, two hypothesis testing models are proposed. We then implement the two above mentio...