Face Detection Using

Neural Network
By
Kamaljeet Verma (05305905)
Akshay Ukey (05305045)
 Problem Definition
Identify and locate human faces in an
image regardless of their:
– Position
– Scale
– Orientation
– Illumination
 Motivation
A challenging problem faced by Computer-
Vision community.
Face is a highly non-rigid object.
Main step before Face Recognition.
First step in many surveillance systems.
Example applications:
– Automated security systems
– Intelligence information
– Robotics
 Face Pattern Space

Consider 19 x 19 thumbnail face pattern.

Possible combinations of gray values is

256361 = 22888

Number of galaxies in the Universe ≈ 235

Extremely high dimensional space.

Difficulties in Face Detection
Facial Expressions
– Smiling, frowning, etc.
Presence or absence of structural
components
– Beard, moustache, glasses, etc.
Pose
– Frontal, upside down
Position
– Location of the face in the image.
Difficulties in Face Detection
Scale
– Size of the face in the image can vary.
Orientation
– Face appearance directly vary for different
rotations about the camera’s optical axis
Illumination
– Images taken in different lighting conditions
adds to the variation in face pictures.
 Example

Images from CMU dataset

 Current Research
Representation of a typical face in the
computer.
Search Strategy
Increasing the speed of the process of
system.
Achieving accuracy.
Combining detection results.
 Appearance based method
Models
– Learned from a set of training images.

Training set
– Captures the representative variability of
facial appearance.
 Build Training Set
Proper mix of positive and negative examples.
Positive Examples
– Having as much variation as possible.
– Manually resize each into a standard size(e.g.:19 x
19)
Negative examples
– Images not containing face
– Large image subspace
– Bootstrapping
 Representation
Raster scanned
image represented by
a vector of intensity
values.
Block-based
– Process each image
as if divided into
blocks.
– Blocks may be
overlapping or non-
overlapping
 Pre-processing
Masking
– Minimize background noise in face image
Illumination Gradient Correction
– To minimize heavy shadows due to lighting
angles.
Histogram Equalization
– To compensate for difference in illumination
brightness, skin colours, camera responses,
etc.
 Masking

z Remove near-boundary pixels with

19 x 19 binary mask.

z For avoiding unwanted background

structure from face image.

z Effectively reduces the 19 x 19 pixel

window vector space.
 Illumination Correction
Take an image of 21 x 21 pixels.
Divide it into 7 x 7 blocks.
For each block compute minimum intensity
pixel giving 3x3 minimal brightness plane.
Resize the plane to 21 x 21.
Subtract this plane from original image.
 Histogram Equalization
zEqualize intensity values.

zExpand range of intensities in the window.

 Classifiers
Different classifiers can be used.
Classifiers
– Neural Network
– Principal Component Analysis
– Support Vector Machines
– Naives Bayes Classifier
Neural Network Approach
Neural Network - Introduction

A modeling technique
– Based on the observed behavior of biological
neurons.
– Used to mimic the functioning of brain.

Features
– Ability to adapt to new environments.
– Made up of large number of processing units.
– High processing speed.
– Used to solve many complex problems.
Components of a Neural Network
Four Main Components

– Processing Units (pj)

Each pj has a certain activation level

– Weighted Interconnections
Determine how the activation of one unit leads to input for
another unit.

– An activation rule
Used to produce output signals.

– A learning rule
Specifies how to adjust the weights for a given input/output
pair.
 The Perceptron Model
A perceptron is a computing element with input lines
having associated weights and the cell having a
threshold value.
Model motivated by the biological neuron.

Output (y)

Threshold (θ)

w1 w2 wn Weights
...

x1 x2 x3 Inputs
 NN in Face Detection?
Neural Nets can classify data into a given set of
classes.
Face Detection Classes
– Face class
– Non Face class
Face Detection Input and Output
– The shade of GRAY of each pixel is presented to the
neuron in parallel.
– E.g. for a 10 X 10 pixel image, there will be 100 input
lines x1 to x100, with respective weights w1 to w100.
– The output y will represent the presence or absence
of a face.
NN based Face Detector (Rowley)
Two Stages:
– It applies a neural network-based filter to an
image.
– It arbitrates the filter outputs.
Filter
– examines image at several scales.
– Detects locations containing faces.
Arbitrator
– Merges detections from individual filters
– Eliminates overlapping detections.
 Stage 1. NN based Filter

20 X 20 window is extracted from input image.

Preprocessing
– Applied to the 20 X 20 window.
– Attempts to equalize the intensity values across the
values.
– Steps
• Illumination Correction
• Histogram Equalization
 Stage One
Neural Network
– Input is the 20 x 20 preprocessed window.
Input Layer
– Consists of 400 pixel intensity values.
Hidden Layer
– Consists of 3 types of hidden neurons
– 4 which look at 10 x 10 pixel subregions
– 16 which look at 5 x 5 pixel subregions
– 6 which look at overlapping 20 x 5 pixel subregions.
Output Layer
– Single neuron having real value in the range [-1,1]
– Indicates if the window contains a face or not.
Algorithm for Face Detection
 Stage One
Training
– Neural network is trained using standard
backpropagation algorithm.
– Done on face examples gathered from face
databases at CMU and Harvard.
– Face examples easy to find.
– Non face examples
Very large space
Collecting small “representative” set is difficult.
– Bootstrapping technique can be used.
 Stage One
Bootstrapping
1. Start with a set of non-face examples in the training
set
2. Train the neural network with the current training set.
3. Run the learned face detector on a sequence of
random images.
4. Collect all the non-face patterns wrongly classified
as faces.
5. Add these non-face patterns to the training set.
6. Go to step 2 or stop if satisfied.
 Stage One
Scaling

Scale down the image by a factor

of 1.2 and run the algorithm again.
Scan an input image and run the (Process continued until image size
algorithm. is too small).
 Stage Two: Arbitration
Merging overlapping detections within one
network.
Use multiple networks
– initialize them to different initial weights.
– Run the algorithm.
– Different sets of negative examples will result.
– Arbitrate among their outputs.
Eg. Signal face detection only when all the
networks agree that there is a face.
Experimental Results
 Experimental Results

False Detect False Miss

The algorithm can detect between 78.9% and 90.5% of

faces in a set of 130 test images, with an acceptable
number of false detections.
 Conclusion
The neural network approach has better
performance in comparison to other
approaches.
The technique reduces the processing
time by not using fully connected network.
The approach is heavily dependent on the
training set selected.
 References
H. Rowley, S. Baluja, and T. Kanade, Neural Network-
based Face Detection, Proc. of IEEE Conf. on CVPR,
1996.
H. Rowley, S. Baluja, and T. Kanade, Neural Network-
based Face Detection. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal.
Mach. Intelligence, 1998.
K.K Sung, and T Poggio. Example-based learning for
view-based human face detection. IEEE Trans.
Pattern Anal. Mach. Intelligence, 1998.
Recent Advances in Face Detection, IEEE ICPR 2004
Tutorial, Cambridge, United Kingdom, August 22,
2004.