Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, Takeo Kanade

(easy cases, see paper 1 below)

(difficult cases, see paper 2 below)
(The eye locations are merely to show the orientation of the detected face. They were not located by the detector.)

Thesis Dissertation

You can download my thesis dissertation [9.5 MB gzipped postscript, about 30 MB uncompressed].

Demo and Results

We digitized some video sequences at about 3-5 frames per second at a resolution of 320x240 pixels. These images were then processed by the face detector, taking about 5-10 seconds per frame on a 200 MHz SGI Indigo. The results were then MPEG encoded, resulting in the following four videos: [person walking] [web browsing] [person walking again] [crowd]

Papers

Neural Network-Based Face Detection, by Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Takeo Kanade. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, volume 20, number 1, pages 23-38, January 1998.
Rotation Invariant Neural Network-Based Face Detection, by Henry A. Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Takeo Kanade. Accepted for oral presentation at Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1998, pages 38-44. Also available as CMU CS Technical Report CMU-CS-97-201, 1997.

You can also look at Henry Rowley's thesis proposal document and proposal presentation slides, 1996. Also available are some older papers whose content is covered by the papers above.

Test Data

The test images used in the above papers are available. I encourage other people working on face detection to use these images, to provide a standard for comparison.

Applications

Several researchers have incorporated this face detection system into their own projects:

Michael Smith at CMU has used the detector as one feature for generating summaries, or "skims", of video sequences.
Shin'ichi Satoh has used the detector as part of a system called Name-It, which automatically associates names with faces in video.
WebSeer was a search engine for images in the web, developed at the University of Chicago. It used many features for matching images to your query, including the results of our face detector for locating portraits.

Contact Information