Face Detection with Automatic White Balance for Digital Still Camera

Automatic focusing is very important to high-quality image acquisition for digital still camera system. This paper will propose a new automatic focusing method using skin- color face detection to automatically determine focusing area. In order to overcome the influence of color temperature on the face detection method, this paper proposes a new automatic white balance method by learning color temperature curve with a statistical method. The method compensates color shifts of images by locating a set of compensation gains from the trained color temperature regression curve. A comparative setup of experiments is built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Controlled experimental factors include light source, object distance and initial lens position. Modulation transfer function of images is applied to objectively evaluate the image quality before and after the new automatic focusing method. Experimental results show our method has high success rate of face localization, and effectively achieves automatic focusing.