Face detection, because of its vast array of applications, is one of the most active research areas in computer vision. In this book, we review various approaches to face detection developed in the past decade, with more emphasis on boosting-based learning algorithms. We then present a series of algorithms that are empowered by the statistical view of boosting and the concept of multiple instance learning. We start by describing a boosting learning framework that is capable to handle billions of training examples. It differs from traditional bootstrapping schemes in that no intermediate thresholds need to be set during training, yet the total number of negative examples used for feature selection remains constant and focused (on the poor performing ones). A multiple instance pruning scheme is then adopted to set the intermediate thresholds after boosting learning. This algorithm generates detectors that are both fast and accurate. We then present two multiple instance learning schemes for face detection, multiple instance learning boosting (MILBoost) and winner-take-all multiple category boosting (WTA-McBoost). MILBoost addresses the uncertainty in accurately pinpointing the location of the object being detected, while WTA-McBoost addresses the uncertainty in determining the most appropriate subcategory label for multiview object detection. Both schemes can resolve the ambiguity of the labeling process and reduce outliers during training, which leads to improved detector performances. In many applications, a detector trained with generic data sets may not perform optimally in a new environment. We propose detection adaption, which is a promising solution for this problem. We present an adaptation scheme based on the Taylor expansion of the boosting learning objective function, and we propose to store the second order statistics of the generic training data for future adaptation. We show that with a small amount of labeled data in the new environment, the detector's performance can be greatly improved. We also present two interesting applications where boosting learning was applied successfully. The first application is face verification for filtering and ranking image/video search results on celebrities. We present boosted multi-task learning (MTL), yet another boosting learning algorithm that extends MILBoost with a graphical model. Since the available number of training images for each celebrity may be limited, learning individual classifiers for each person may cause overfitting. MTL jointly learns classifiers for multiple people by sharing a few boosting classifiers in order to avoid overfitting. The second application addresses the need of speaker detection in conference rooms. The goal is to find who is speaking, given a microphone array and a panoramic video of the room. We show that by combining audio and visual features in a boosting framework, we can determine the speaker's position very accurately. Finally, we offer our thoughts on future directions for face detection. Table of Contents: A Brief Survey of the Face Detection Literature / Cascade-based Real-Time Face Detection / Multiple Instance Learning for Face Detection / Detector Adaptation / Other Applications / Conclusions and Future Work

The Local Binary pattern (LBP) is a well-known feature and has been widely used for human identification. However, the amount of information extracted is limited which reduces the LBP discriminative power. Recently, some enhancements have been proposed by adding preprocessing stages or considering more neighbor pixels to enrich the extracted feature. In this paper, we propose Uniformly-sampled Thresholds for LBP (UTLBP) operator that increases the richness of information derived from the LBP feature. It outperforms other features in various probe sets of the large CAS-PEAL database for face recognition. Moreover, we collected a database of 25 families to verify the superiority of the proposed feature in the family verification. Results show that using the UTLBP, the total error in face recognition and family verification is reduced up to 8% and 3% respectively comparing to the state of the art LBP. It improves the missing family member verification performance up to 3% where, contrary to expectation, increasing the LBP operator radius worsens the performance by 2%.

Finally, we offer our thoughts on future directions for face detection. --Book Jacket.

Biometrics is the study of methods of recognizing humans based on their behavioral and physical characteristics or traits. Face recognition is one of the biometric modalities that received a great amount of attention from many researchers during the past few decades because of its potential applications in a variety of security domains. Face recognition however is not only concerned with recognizing human faces, but also with recognizing faces of non-biological entities or avatars. Fortunately, the need for secure and affordable virtual worlds is attracting the attention of many researchers who seek to find fast, automatic and reliable ways to identify virtual worlds' avatars. In this work, I propose new techniques for recognizing avatar faces, which also can be applied to recognize human faces. Proposed methods are based mainly on a well-known and efficient local texture descriptor, Local Binary Pattern (LBP). I am applying different versions of LBP such as: Hierarchical Multi-scale Local Binary Patterns and Adaptive Local Binary Pattern with Directional Statistical Features in the wavelet space and discuss the effect of this application on the performance of each LBP version. In addition, I use a new version of LBP called Local Difference Pattern (LDP) with other well-known descriptors and classifiers to differentiate between human and avatar face images. The original LBP achieves high recognition rate if the tested images are pure but its performance gets worse if these images are corrupted by noise. To deal with this problem I propose a new definition to the original LBP in which the LBP descriptor will not threshold all the neighborhood pixel based on the central pixel value. A weight for each pixel in the neighborhood will be computed, a new value for each pixel will be calculated and then using simple statistical operations will be used to compute the new threshold, which will change automatically, based on the pixel's values. This threshold can be applied with the original LBP or any other version of LBP and can be extended to work with Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) or any version of LTP to produce different versions of LTP for recognizing noisy avatar and human faces images.

Face recognition is one of the most commonly used biometric features in the identification of people. In this article, a novel facial image recognition architecture is proposed with a novel image descriptor which is called as fully center symmetric dual cross pattern (FCSDCP) The proposed architecture consists of preprocessing, feature extraction and classification phases.