A robust method for detecting arbitrarily tilted human faces in color images

This paper presents the design of a robust face detector that can detect arbitrarily tilted human faces in color images. This detector locates face regions by identifying mouth corners and eyes. The novel techniques included in the proposed detector are: (1) a method for compensating the colors of the input images, (2) a method for deskewing tilted faces, (3) a method for locating mouth corners, and (4) a discriminant function for positioning eyes. According to the performance evaluation on three test databases which contain 1791 faces on 1580 images, the proposed method achieves a precision rate of 94.62% and a recall rate of 92.24% in average at the detection speed of 1.6 faces per second. The performance of the proposed detector also slightly outperforms a detector from CMU.