Face detection using template matching and skin-color information

A face-detection approach is proposed in the paper. Firstly, a luminance-conditional distribution model of skin-color information is used to detect skin pixels in color images; then, morphological operations are used to extract skin-region rectangles; finally, template matching based on a linear transformation is used to detect face in each skin-region rectangle. Experimental results on some color images from the FERET database and from the Internet are encouraging. The proposed algorithm is shown to be effective and efficient in detecting frontal faces in color images.