Fast marching methods applied to face location in videophone applications using colour information

A new method is proposed to automatically segment out a person's face from a given sequence of images that consists of a head-and-shoulder view, using the fast marching level set approach. The method proposed involves a fast, reliable and computationally efficient algorithm, which exploits the colour information in an image to segment the face region. The colour information is derived and used to classify pixels in the image into different levels depending on the value of the colour information for that pixel. Once this is achieved, a priority-labelled fast marching level set algorithm is utilised to locate the face region. The performance of the fast marching face-segmentation algorithm is illustrated by some simulation results carried out on head-and-shoulder test images.