Extraction of Facial Feature Points Using Cumulative Histogram

This paper proposes a novel adaptive algorithm to extract facial feature points automatically such as eyebrows corners, eyes corners, nostrils, nose tip, and mouth corners in frontal view faces, which is based on cumulative histogram approach by varying different threshold values. At first, the method adopts the Viola-Jones face detector to detect the location of face and also crops the face region in an image. From the concept of the human face structure, the six relevant regions such as right eyebrow, left eyebrow, right eye, left eye, nose, and mouth areas are cropped in a face image. Then the histogram of each cropped relevant region is computed and its cumulative histogram value is employed by varying different threshold values to create a new filtering image in an adaptive way. The connected component of interested area for each relevant filtering image is indicated our respective feature region. A simple linear search algorithm for eyebrows, eyes and mouth filtering images and contour algorithm for nose filtering image are applied to extract our desired corner points automatically. The method was tested on a large BioID frontal face database in different illuminations, expressions and lighting conditions and the experimental results have achieved average success rates of 95.27%.