3. COMBINING HAAR FEATURES AND SKIN COLOR BASED FACE DETECTORS
Our motivation in this work is to decrease the false positive rate of the VJ face detector [4]. The flowchart in Figure 1 shows the steps followed to decrease the false positive rate. Given a color image possibly containing a number of faces, the first step is to apply an illumination compensation algorithm with the goal of reducing the effects of lighting. Then, the image is passed through the VJ detector and a skin-pixel detector. In the next step, the analysis windows that are detected as face by the VJ algorithm are verified by a skin-color based method. Below each step shown in Figure 1 will be explained in more detail. Color image Illumination compensation Skin color VJ face detection detector