Face localization in color images with complex background

In this paper we describe a two step algorithm which localizes faces in 2D color images depicting a single face on a complex background. Given a single image, the algorithm roughly determines the skin regions and then searches for eyes within them. A face is localized if at least one eye is present in a skin region. The system is based on a support vector machine trained to separate sub-images representing eyes from others. The algorithm is robust to scale, illumination, pose variations and deals with partial occlusions. Results on several public databases are presented.