Face and facial feature localization

In this paper we present a general technique for face and facial feature localization in 2D color images with arbitrary background. In a previous work we studied an eye localization module, while here we focus on mouth localization. Given in input an image that depicts a sole person, first we exploit the color information to limit the search area to candidate mouth regions, then we determine the exact mouth position by means of a SVM trained for the purpose. This component-based approach achieves the localization of both the faces and the corresponding facial features, being robust to partial occlusions, pose, scale and illumination variations. We report the results of the separate modules of the single feature classifiers and their combination on images of several public databases.