MATHEMATICAL MORPHOLOGY BASED AUTOMATED CONTROL POINT DETECTION FROM HUMAN FACIAL IMAGE

摘要

The ultimate goal of this research is to incorporate facial animation based on image morphing in a very narrow bandwidth video transmission, especially in video conferencing, news telecast etc., where the background as well as the object in the image change little. As a part of the whole work, in this paper, an efficient mathematical morphology-based facial feature control point detection technique is proposed. By facial feature control point we mean facial feature (i.e. eye, lip etc.) surrounding points and other important points in the face which can be utilized to create facial animation based on image metamorphosis. In the experiment, mathematical morphology tools are used both for filtering and pattern matching. At first, intensity-independent, color-based segmentation is used with some morphological processing on the input image to separate skin regions. Then, the parallel eye segments are searched by erosion of the edge-thinned image with eye corner structuring elements. By combining them, the probable eye segment pair is identified. Then, using facial structural knowledge, the lips and other control points are detected. The accuracy of the proposed method is within quite acceptable limits; moreover, the method is capable of working with images of average quality or close to average quality.