• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.163-172
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• 2005

When tracking a human face in the moving pictures with complex background under irregular lighting conditions, the detected face can be larger including background or smaller including only a part of the face. Even background can be detected as a face area. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a new face tracking method using a block difference image and a Kalman estimator. The block difference image allows us to detect even a small motion of a human and the face area is selected using the skin color inside the detected motion area. If the pixels with skin color inside the detected motion area, the boundary of the area is represented by a code sequence using the 8-neighbor window and the head area is detected analysing this code. The pixels in the head area is segmented by colors and the region most similar with the skin color is considered as a face area. The detected face area is represented by a rectangle including the area and its four vertices are used as the states of the Kalman estimator to trace the motion of the face area. It is proved by the experiments that the proposed method increases the accuracy of face detection and reduces the fare detection time significantly.