Robust facial feature points extraction in color images

A method of facial feature points extraction based on improved active appearance model (AAM) with Gabor wavelet features was presented in the paper. After the pre-processing of a standard face detector and lighting compensation, the paper proposed a hybrid AAM by combining the local skin similarity with the original local grey-level appearance model. Moreover, the feature points by the hybrid AAM and their neighbors were considered by a classification problem to further refine the results. Namely, the Gabor feature around the feature points was extracted, trained by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and classified by K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) to give the precise location of the feature points. Experimental results indicated that facial feature points can be located robustly and precisely by the proposed method.