Rotated Face Detection Using Symmetry Detection

In many face recognition applications such as security systems, it is assumed that upright faces are given to the system. In order for the system to be used in more general environments, the system should be able to deal with the rotated faces properly. It is a generally used approach to rotate the face detection window and apply face detector repeatedly to detect a rotated face in the given image. But such an approach requires a lot of computation time. In this paper, a method of extracting the axis of symmetry for a given set of points is proposed. The axis of symmetry for the edge points in the face detection window is extracted in a way that is fast and accurate, and the face detector is applied only for that direction. It is shown that the mean and standard deviation of the symmetry detection error is and respectively, for the database used.