Abstract
Face detection is the first step for many facial analysis applications and has been extensively researched in the visible spectrum. While significant progress has been made in the field of face detection in the visible spectrum, the performance of current face detection methods in the thermal infrared spectrum is far from perfect and unable to cope with real-time applications. As the Viola-Jones algorithm has become a common method of face detection, this paper aims to improve the performance of the Viola-Jones algorithm in the thermal spectrum for detecting faces with or without eyeglasses. A performance comparison has been made of three different features, HOG, LBP, and Haar-like, to find the most suitable one for face detection from thermal images. Additionally, to accelerate the detection speed, a pre-processing stage is added in both training and detecting phases. Two pre-processing methods have been tested and compared, together with the three features. It is found that the proposed process for performance enhancement gave higher detection accuracy (95%) than the Viola-Jones method (90%) and doubled the detection speed as well.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Reese, K., Zheng, Y., Elmaghraby, A.: A comparison of face detection algorithms in visible and thermal spectrums. In: International Conference on Advances in Computer Science and Application (2012)
Viola, P., Jones, M.: Robust real-time face detection. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 57(2), 137–154 (2004)
Gupta, B.S.G., Tiwari, A.: Face detection using gabor feature extraction and artificial neural networks. In: Proceedings of ISCET, pp. 18–23 (2010)
Zheng, Y.: Face detection and eyeglasses detection for thermal face recognition. In: Proceedings of SPIE 8300 (2012)
Cheong, Y.K., Yap, V.V., Nisar, H.: A novel face detection algorithm using thermal imaging. In: IEEE Symposium on Computer Applications and Industrial Electronics (ISCAIE) (2014)
Mekyska, J., Espinosa-Duro, V., Faundez-Zanuy, M.: Face segmentation: a comparison between visible and thermal images. In: IEEE International Carnahan Conference on Security Technology (ICCST) (2010)
Sumathi, C.P., Santhanam, T., Mahadevi, M.: Automatic facial expression analysis: a survey. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Eng. Surv. 3(6), 47–59 (2012)
Otsu, N.: A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. 9(1), 62–66 (1979)
Trujillo, L., et al.: Automatic feature localization in thermal images for facial expression recognition. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2005)
Wong, W.K., et al.: Face detection in thermal imaging using head curve geometry. In: The 5th International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP) (2012)
Ojala, T., Pietikainen, M., Maenpaa, T.: Multiresolution gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification with local binary patterns. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24(7), 971–987 (2002)
Dalal, N., Triggs, B.: Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2005)
Wang, S., et al.: A natural visible and infrared facial expression database for expression recognition and emotion inference. IEEE Trans. Multimed. 12(7), 682–691 (2010)
Esposito, A., Capuano, V., Mekyska, J., Faundez-Zanuy, M.: A naturalistic database of thermal emotional facial expressions and effects of induced emotions on memory. In: Esposito, A., Esposito, A.M., Vinciarelli, A., Hoffmann, R., Müller, V.C. (eds.) Cognitive Behavioural Systems. LNCS, vol. 7403, pp. 158–173. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34584-5_12
Training Image Labeler (2014). http://uk.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/trainingimagelabeler-app.html
Wang, S., et al.: Eye localization from thermal infrared images. Pattern Recogn. 46(10), 2613–2621 (2013)
Kanwal, N., Bostanci, E., Clark, A.F.: Evaluation method, dataset size or dataset content: how to evaluate algorithms for image matching? J. Math. Imaging Vis. 55(3), 378–400 (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Basbrain, A.M., Gan, J.Q., Clark, A. (2017). Accuracy Enhancement of the Viola-Jones Algorithm for Thermal Face Detection. In: Huang, DS., Hussain, A., Han, K., Gromiha, M. (eds) Intelligent Computing Methodologies. ICIC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10363. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63315-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63315-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63314-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63315-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)