An adaptive skin color model for a human face detection

Face detection is primarily used for identity. Human face detection is the basic approach in applications such as human computer interface, video surveillance and is a prima facie for face recognition. This paper presents a method of detecting human faces irrespective of different ethnicities. Firstly skin and non skin regions are separated using a skin color model and focus on skin regions to detect faces. Our method uses heuristic approach to detect skin regions over the entire image. Experimental results shows that the proposed method detects faces among various facial expressions in color, different face orientations and various ethnic background and demonstrate successful face detection over the FERET benchmark database and acquired images. GUI based method is implemented which includes features such as detection of faces using webcam and count the number of faces detected.