500-fps face tracking system

• DOI: 10.1007/s11554-012-0255-8
• Publication Date: 2012-05-29T04:33:05Z
• Authors: Idaku Ishii; Tomoki Ichida; Qingyi Gu; Takeshi Takaki
• Keywords: Boosting; Facial motion capture; Tracking (education); Haar-like features; Object-class detection; Frame rate; AdaBoost

In this paper, we propose a high-speed vision system that can be applied to real-time face tracking at 500 fps using GPU acceleration of a boosting-based face tracking algorithm. By assuming a small image displacement between frames, which is a property of high-frame rate vision, we develop an improved boosting-based face tracking algorithm for fast face tracking by enhancing the Viola---Jones face detector. In the improved algorithm, face detection can be efficiently accelerated by reducing the number of window searches for Haar-like features, and the tracked face pattern can be localized pixel-wise even when the window is sparsely scanned for a larger face pattern by introducing skin color extraction in the boosting-based face detector. The improved boosting-based face tracking algorithm is implemented on a GPU-based high-speed vision platform, and face tracking can be executed in real time at 500 fps for an 8-bit color image of 512 × 512 pixels. In order to verify the effectiveness of the developed face tracking system, we install it on a two-axis mechanical active vision system and perform several experiments for tracking face patterns.