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A Novel Face Segmentation Algorithm from a Video Sequence for Real-Time Face Recognition

Abstract

The first step in an automatic face recognition system is to localize the face region in a cluttered background and carefully segment the face from each frame of a video sequence. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient algorithm for segmenting a face suitable for recognition from a video sequence. The cluttered background is first subtracted from each frame, in the foreground regions, a coarse face region is found using skin colour. Then using a dynamic template matching approach the face is efficiently segmented. The proposed algorithm is fast and suitable for real-time video sequence. The algorithm is invariant to large scale and pose variation. The segmented face is then handed over to a recognition algorithm based on principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis. The online face detection, segmentation, and recognition algorithms take an average of 0.06 second on a 3.2 GHz P4 machine.

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Correspondence to R. Srikantaswamy.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://doi.org/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Srikantaswamy, R., Sudhaker Samuel, R.D. A Novel Face Segmentation Algorithm from a Video Sequence for Real-Time Face Recognition. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2007, 051648 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/51648

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/51648

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