A fast face detection method for illumination variant condition

Abstract. General boosting algorithms for face detection use rectangular features. To obtain a better performance, it needs more training samples and may generate an unpredictable number of features. Besides using pixel values, which are easily aected by illumination, to calculate the rectangular features, it usually needs to preprocess the data before calculating the values of the features. Such an approach may increase computation time. To overcome the drawbacks, we propose a new solution based on the Adaboost algorithm and the Back Propagation Network (BPN) of a Neural Network (NN), combining local and global features with cascade architecture to detect human faces. We use the Modied Census Transform (MCT) feature, which belongs to texture features and is less sensitive to illumination, for local feature calculation. In this approach, it is not necessary to preprocess each sub-window of the image. For classication, we use the structure of the hierarchical feature to control the number of features. With only MCT, it is easy to misjudge faces and, therefore, in this work, we include the brightness information of global features to eliminate the False Positive (FP) regions. As a result, the proposed approach can have a Detection Rate (DR) of 99%, an FPs of only 11, and detection speed of 27.92 Frames Per Second (FPS).