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System and method for rapidly tracking multiple faces

  • US 7,003,135 B2
  • Filed: 08/17/2001
  • Issued: 02/21/2006
  • Est. Priority Date: 05/25/2001
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. A system for rapidly tracking multiple faces, comprising:

  • a face-like region generator having a skin region extractor, a motion analyzer and a silhouette analyzer, the skin region extractor generating a plurality of skin regions by detecting skin color pixels of an input image, the motion analyzer determining possible face-like regions from the skin regions based on moving information of the input image, and the silhouette analyzer analyzing whether there exists a raised shape in the input image to accordingly separate connected face regions and determining that there exists a face-like region based on the following conditions;

    e(i)>

    w and e(j)<



    w, where w=0.5*(p(j))−

    p(i));

    e(i)=d(p(i));

    d(x)=v(x−

    1)−

    v(x+1);

    v(x) denotes a vertical position of the first touched pixel of a connected region when tracking all pixels of an image along the x-th column from top to down;

    e( ) denotes the edge response of a vertical edge;

    p( ) denotes a position of the vertical edge;

    i denotes an ith pixel;

    j denotes a jth frame; and

    w denotes a weight of the face-like region;

    a face recorder for recording tracked faces;

    a face status checker for checking the face-like regions and the faces previously tracked and recorded in the face recorder to determine whether the face-like regions are old faces which have been tracked in a previous frame or possible new faces that are newly occurring faces;

    a face verification engine for determining whether the possible new faces are new faces; and

    a face tracking engine for tracking multiple faces based on the new and old faces, and the skin regions provided by the skin region extractor, wherein, when a tracked face is a new face, the face tracking engine directly adds the new face to the face recorder; and

    when a tracked face is an old face, the face tracking engine determines whether there exists more than a predefined percentage of overlapping area between the old face and a skin region;

    wherein if there exists more than a predefined percentage of overlapping area between the old face and a skin region, the face tracking engine determines that the old face is still in the current frame and locates in the center of the skin region; and

    if there does not exist more than a predefined percentage of overlapping area between the old face and a skin region, the position of the old face is determined by a correlation operation.

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