The face provides a variety of different communicative functions such as identification, the perception of emotional expressions, and lip-reading. Many applications in human computer interaction require tracking a human face. Tracking human faces is one of our efforts of user modeling which is to provide the computer with necessary information about users and environment.

We have developed a system that can track a person's face while the person moves freely (walks, jumps, sits and rises). The system has achieved a rate of up to 30+ frame/second using a low end workstation (HP9000) with a framegrabber and a Canon VC-C1 camera. Three types of models have been employed in developing the system.
First, we have proposed a stochastic model to characterize skin colors of human faces. The information provided by the model is sufficient for tracking a human face in various poses and views. This model can adapt in real-time to different people and different lighting conditions.
Then, a motion model is used to estimate image motion and to predict search window. Third, a camera model is used to predict and to compensate for camera motion. The system has been demonstrated to hundreds of people, and tested by different inputs (video cameras, video tape, and TV news) and under different environments (indoor and outdoor).

Using the skin color model, we can find the face region:

More examples on face locating:

Some results from real-time tracking.

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QuickTime Movies

Please note: all the demo sequences were processed on an HP-9000 workstation in real time.

CMU Face Tracking Project on CBS local station (KDKA 2) news (QuickTime 953K)

Input from a camera (demo in lab) (QuickTime 2.4M)

Input from TV news (C-Span) (QuickTime 1.2M)

Input from a video tape (outdoor scene) (QuickTime 1.3M)

A on-line paper on real-time face tracker:

  • A REAL-TIME FACE TRACKER (postscript)

    Jie Yang and Alex Waibel
    Proceedings of WACV'96 (Sarasota, Florida, USA), pp. 142-147.

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    KEYWORDS Face Tracking, Color Modeling, Real-time Tracking
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