Face and facial feature detection evaluation. Performance evaluation of public domain haar detectors for face and facial feature detection

Abstract

Fast and reliable face and facial feature detection are required abilities for any Human Computer Interaction approach based on Computer Vision. Since the publication of the Viola-Jones object detection framework and the more recent open source implementation, an increasing number of applications have appeared, particularly in the context of facial processing. In this respect, the OpenCV community shares a collection of public domain classifiers for this scenario. However, as far as we know these classifiers have never been evaluated and/or compared. In this paper we analyze the individual performance of all those public classifiers getting the best performance for each target. These results are valid to define a baseline for future approaches. Additionally we propose a simple hierarchical combination of those classifiers to increase the facial feature detection rate while reducing the face false detection rate.