Tiny Frontal Face Detection for Robots

This paper proposes a novel face detection method that finds tiny faces located at a long range even with low-resolution input images captured by a moving robot. The proposed approach can locate extremely small-sized face regions of 12x12 pixels by combining the results from mean-shift color tracking, short- and long-range face detection, and omega shape detection. According to the experimental results on realistic databases, the performance of the proposed approach is at a sufficiently practical level for various robot applications.