Hardware Architecture of a Haar Classifier Based Face Detection System Using a Skip Scheme

Face recognition applications are being widely studied owing to their extensive usability in the field of computer vision. However, processing an entire image requires a considerable amount of time. To reduce the processing time, several algorithms that extract only the face from the image during pre-processing are studied. Haar classifiers are extensively used for the hardware implementation of face detection algorithms that improve the processing speed of face classification. This paper proposes a Haar classifier based face detection architecture that removes unnecessary iterations during classification to further improve the processing speed. The proposed architecture improves the processing speed by 4.46% compared to that of conventional Haar classifier based face detection architectures, for face detection using a VGA image with 30 faces. The proposed architecture tends to improve the processing speed as the number of faces in the image increases while matching the detection accuracy of conventional methods. Additionally, this architecture can be widely applied to classification algorithms that are based on iterations.