Efficient approach for facial feature detection

Facial feature extraction is an important step in automated visual interpretation and human face recognition. Among the facial features, the eyes play the most important part in the recognition process. In this paper, an efficient approach for detecting and locating the eyes in a head-and-shoulders image is devised. Possible eye candidates in an image are identified by means of the valley features and corners of the eyes. Two possible eye candidates are considered to belong to the eyes of a human face if their respective local properties are similar; an eye window is then formed. Each of the eye region candidates is then further verified by comparing them with a standard eye template, and by measuring its symmetry. Experiments show that this approach is fast and reliable.