Application and Evaluation of Face Detection


Aim

The aim of this project was to develop a system that can detect the presence and the position of human faces in greyscale images and to evaluate its performance.

Platform

The system was implemented in Matlab, using a Face Detection Toolbox, implemented in University of Alberta, California, US in Microsoft Windows Environment.

System Description

A set of face and non-face images was used to train the system. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to reduce dimensionality of data. The K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN) method is used to classify pixels to face and non-face categories. An overview of the system is given below:
System Description

Evaluation

To evaluate the system, its output (black box on the figure below) was compared with Ground Truth (GT). Ground Truth for each test image was specified manually (green box on the figure below).
According to the comparison, each pixel on the image was characterised as
System Evaluation

The performance of the system was characterised by measure that is estimated by the following formula. This formula takes into account the number of pixels classified into TP, FP and FN.
Performance Measure Formula

Results

Ten greyscale images were used to test the system. For each image, the output of the algorithm (black box) was compared to the GT provided by a human observer (green box):

Face Detection ResultFace Detection Result

The graph below summarises the results of the system evaluation:

Graph of evaluation results

Conclusions

The performance of the system has many constraints, therefore future work should consider a scale invariant version of the algorithm or more sophisticated algorithms. The proposed evaluation technique is valuable because it can allow the comparison of different algorithms and therefore assists the process of improving the system.

About this work

The above system was implemented by Theresa Apolinario for his final year project at Kingston University, under the supervision of Dimitrios Makris, during the academic year 2005-2006.