Improved Active Shape Model for Facial Feature Extraction in Color Images

In this paper we present an improved Active Shape Model (ASM) for facial features extraction. The original ASM developed by Cootes et al. [1] suffers from factors such as, poor model initialization, modeling the intensity of the local structure of the facial features, and alignment of the shape model to a new instant of the object in a given image using simple Euclidian transformation. The core of our enhancement relies on three improvements (a) initializing the ASM model using the centers of the mouth and eyes, which are located using color information, (b) incorporating RGB color information to represent the local structure of the feature points, and (c) applying 2D affine transformation in aligning the facial features that are perturbed by head pose variations, which effectively aligns the matched facial features to the shape model and compensates for the effect of the head pose variations. Experiments on a face database of 70 subjects show that our approach outperforms the standard...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JMM2
• Authors: Mohammad H. Mahoor, Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb, A-Nasser Ansari
• Keywords: Facial Features, Facial Features Extraction, JMM2 2006, Shape Model