Extracting contours and features from frontal face images

The aim of this research is to locate a face in an input image, then extract the contour lines of the face and the facial features, such as the eyes, mouth, eyebrows and nose in a standard office environment. In this paper we describe a system for extracting the facial features required to reconstruct a 3D model of a face from a 2D image. The technique for extracting the eye and mouth contour lines is based on the combination of a quadratic approximation of the edges and an active contour model. The technique for face outline contour line relys on the hybridization of a symmetrical active contour model and an elastic contour model with a standard facial shape model. We applied this system to 46 faces and compared the results with manually detected contours: 90% of the eye and mouth contours and 80% of the jaw contours and pupil positions matched the hand-prepared contours closely.