Facial feature extraction using topological methods

Automatic facial feature extraction is one of the most important and attempted problems in computer vision. It is a necessary step in face recognition, facial image compression and low-bit video coding. The methodology presented in this paper, considers the facial image as a surface. Topological properties of the facial surface, such as principal curvatures are used to extract the eyes and mouth, which form deep valleys on the surface. Ravines are points on the surface where the maximum curvature is a local maximum in the corresponding principal direction. The basic idea of the proposed method is to model the facial features as ravines on the facial surface. Experimental results have shown accurate extraction of the eye boundaries and the mouth opening in a very small computational time.