Robust face-tracking using skin color and facial shape

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust face tracking algorithm based on the CONDENSATION algorithm that uses skin color and facial shape as observation measures. Two independent trackers are used for robust tracking: one is tracking for the skin colored region and another is tracking for the facial shape region. The two trackers axe coupled by using an importance sampling technique, where the skin color density obtained from the skin color tracker is used as the importance function to generate samples for the shape tracker. The samples of the skin color tracker within the chosen shape region are updated with higher weights. The proposed face tracker shows a robust tracking performance over the skin color based tracker or the facial shape based tracker given the presence of clutter background and/or illumination changes.