Face detection is an important step

Face detection is an important step towards a fully
automatic face recognition system. Among existing techniques
in the literature, methods based on skin-color information have
shown computational effectiveness as well as robustness in
terms of rotation, scaling and partial occlusion. However, due to
color variations resulted from illumination changes, many
color-based techniques have yet to demonstrate a stable state of
performance. In this paper, we present an illumination
invariant color space model to address the color variation issue.
The proposed method is evaluated both in terms of skin-color
detection and face detection performances. Our empirical
experiments evidenced both effectiveness and usefulness of the
proposed method.