Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> We develop a face recognition algorithm which is insensitive to large variation in lighting direction and facial expression. Taking a pattern classification approach, we consider each pixel in an image as a coordinate in a high-dimensional space. We take advantage of the observation that the images of a particular face, under varying illumination but fixed pose, lie in a 3D linear subspace of the high dimensional image space-if the face is a Lambertian surface without shadowing. However, since faces are not truly Lambertian surfaces and do indeed produce self-shadowing, images will deviate from this linear subspace. Rather than explicitly modeling this deviation, we linearly project the image into a subspace in a manner which discounts those regions of the face with large deviation. Our projection method is based on Fisher's linear discriminant and produces well separated classes in a low-dimensional subspace, even under severe variation in lighting and facial expressions. The eigenface technique, another method based on linearly projecting the image space to a low dimensional subspace, has similar computational requirements. Yet, extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed "Fisherface" method has error rates that are lower than those of the eigenface technique for tests on the Harvard and Yale face databases. <s> BIB001 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> In this paper we present a visual learning technique that maximizes the discrimination between positive and negative examples in a training set. We demonstrate our technique in the context of face detection with complea background without color or motion information, which has proven to be a challenging problem. We use a family of discrete Markov processes to model the face and background patterns and estimate the probability models using the data statistics. Then, we convert the learning process into an optimization, selecting the Markov process that optimizes the information-based discrim.ination between the two classes. The detection process is carried out by computing the likelihood ratio using the probability model obtained from the learning procedure. We show that because of the discrete nature of these models, the detection process is at least two orders of magnitude less computationally expensive than neural network approaches. However, no improvement in terms of correct-answer/false-alarm tradeoff is achieved. <s> BIB002 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> We investigate the application of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) in computer vision. SVM is a learning technique developed by V. Vapnik and his team (AT&T Bell Labs., 1985) that can be seen as a new method for training polynomial, neural network, or Radial Basis Functions classifiers. The decision surfaces are found by solving a linearly constrained quadratic programming problem. This optimization problem is challenging because the quadratic form is completely dense and the memory requirements grow with the square of the number of data points. We present a decomposition algorithm that guarantees global optimality, and can be used to train SVM's over very large data sets. The main idea behind the decomposition is the iterative solution of sub-problems and the evaluation of optimality conditions which are used both to generate improved iterative values, and also establish the stopping criteria for the algorithm. We present experimental results of our implementation of SVM, and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a face detection problem that involves a data set of 50,000 data points. <s> BIB003 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> We analyze a few of the commonly used statistics based and machine learning algorithms for natural language disambiguation tasks and observe that they can be recast as learning linear separators in the feature space. Each of the methods makes a priori assumptions which it employs, given the data, when searching for its hypothesis. Nevertheless, as we show, it searches a space that is as rich as the space of all linear separators. We use this to build an argument for a data driven approach which merely searches for a good linear separator in the feature space, without further assumptions on the domain or a specific problem.We present such an approach - a sparse network of linear separators, utilizing the Winnow learning algorithm - and show how to use it in a variety of ambiguity resolution problems. The learning approach presented is attribute-efficient and, therefore, appropriate for domains having very large number of attributes.In particular, we present an extensive experimental comparison of our approach with other methods on several well studied lexical disambiguation tasks such as context-sensitive spelling correction, prepositional phrase attachment and part of speech tagging. In all cases we show that our approach either outperforms other methods tried for these tasks or performs comparably to the best. <s> BIB004 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> We present a neural network-based upright frontal face detection system. A retinally connected neural network examines small windows of an image and decides whether each window contains a face. The system arbitrates between multiple networks to improve performance over a single network. We present a straightforward procedure for aligning positive face examples for training. To collect negative examples, we use a bootstrap algorithm, which adds false detections into the training set as training progresses. This eliminates the difficult task of manually selecting nonface training examples, which must be chosen to span the entire space of nonface images. Simple heuristics, such as using the fact that faces rarely overlap in images, can further improve the accuracy. Comparisons with several other state-of-the-art face detection systems are presented, showing that our system has comparable performance in terms of detection and false-positive rates. <s> BIB005 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> In this paper, we describe an algorithm for object recognition that explicitly models and estimated the posterior probability function, P(object/image). We have chosen a functional form of the posterior probability function that captures the joint statistics of local appearance and position on the object as well as the statistics of local appearance in the visual world at large. We use a discrete representation of local appearance consisting of approximately 10/sup 6/ patterns. We compute an estimate of P(object/image) in closed form by counting the frequency of occurrence of these patterns over various sets of training images. We have used this method for detecting human faces from frontal and profile views. The algorithm for frontal views has shown a detection rate of 93.0% with 88 false alarms on a set of 125 images containing 483 faces combining the MIT test set of Sung and Poggio with the CMU test sets of Rowley, Baluja, and Kanade. The algorithm for detection of profile views has also demonstrated promising results. <s> BIB006 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1,199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions of the database. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to 1) assess the state of the art, 2) identify future areas of research, and 3) measure algorithm performance. <s> BIB007 </s> Detecting Faces in Images : A Survey <s> Sparse Network of Winnows <s> Valiant (1984) and others have studied the problem of learning various classes of Boolean functions from examples. Here we discuss incremental learning of these functions. We consider a setting in which the learner responds to each example according to a current hypothesis. Then the learner updates the hypothesis, if necessary, based on the correct classification of the example. One natural measure of the quality of learning in this setting is the number of mistakes the learner makes. For suitable classes of functions, learning algorithms are available that make a bounded number of mistakes, with the bound independent of the number of examples seen by the learner. We present one such algorithm that learns disjunctive Boolean functions, along with variants for learning other classes of Boolean functions. The basic method can be expressed as a linear-threshold algorithm. A primary advantage of this algorithm is that the number of mistakes grows only logarithmically with the number of irrelevant attributes in the examples. At the same time, the algorithm is computationally efficient in both time and space. <s> BIB008
Yang et al. proposed a method that uses SNoW learning architecture BIB004 ,  to detect faces with different features and expressions, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions  . They also studied the effect of learning with primitive as well as with multiscale features. SNoW (Sparse Network of Winnows) is a sparse network of linear functions that utilizes the Winnow update rule BIB008 . It is specifically tailored for learning in domains in which the potential number of features taking part in decisions is very large, but may be unknown a priori. Some of the characteristics of this learning architecture are its sparsely connected units, the allocation of features and links in a data driven way, the decision mechanism, and the utilization of an efficient update rule. In training the SNoW-based face detector, 1,681 face images from Olivetti  , UMIST  , Harvard  , Yale BIB001 , and FERET BIB007 databases are used to capture the variations in face patterns. To compare with other methods, they report results with two readily BIB005 . Each face is preprocessed before feeding it to an ensemble of neural networks. Several arbitration methods are used to determine whether a face exists based on the output of these networks (Courtesy of H. Rowley, S. Baluja, and T. Kanade). available data sets which contain 225 images with 619 faces BIB005 . With an error rate of 5.9 percent, this technique performs as well as other methods evaluated on the data set 1 in BIB005 , including those using neural networks BIB005 , Kullback relative information BIB002 , naive Bayes classifier BIB006 and support vector machines BIB003 , while being computationally more efficient. See Table 4 for performance comparisons with other face detection methods.