A Method for Face and Facial Parts Recognition Utilizing the Hough Transformation and Related Procedures

Generating Facial Data for the Facial Caricaturing System PICASSO

Abstract

The authors propose a method, applied to automatic facial caricaturing, for extracting faces and facial parts from a grayscale image; an outline of the method and experimental results are presented in this paper. The irises of the eyes were first extracted using a Hough transformation for circles. Based on the location of the extracted irises, the eyebrows, nose, and mouth were extracted by a simple method based on the profile. An experiment using 96 grayscale facial images showed recognition rates of at least 95%. To extract the shapes of the facial parts, a generalized Hough transformation was applied to the edge patterns in the respective facial parts' regions. The parameter space of this Hough transformation was characterized by the dominant coefficients of the K-L expansion applied to the sampled data of the facial part. An experiment attempting extraction of the eye boundary was performed, and it was confirmed that the eye boundaries can be successfully extracted with a limited number of boundary feature points.