Recent Progress in Human Face Detection, Tracking and Recognition

Abstract

Facial recognition is an important research topic in biometrics and has wide applications in pattern recognition and computer vision. This paper aims at providing interested readers with recent progresses in human face detection, tracking, video-based face recognition, and 3D+2D hybrid face recognition. For this purpose, it mainly focuses on those state-of-the-arts methods and technologies that emerged in recent previous few years. Most existing methods in this area are still-image based which do not utilize motion information; whereas most video-based methods work only in 2D video sequences, which are subject to pose and illumination variations. The recent emergence of 3D video cameras capable of producing range image sequences and corresponding texture image sequences simultaneously allows for the possibility of facial recognition in a 3D+2D video-based scenario. In view of this fact, a scheme of face detection, tracking and recognition process in 3D video-based manner is also proposed in this paper with further concerns addressed.