Comparative testing of face detection algorithms

Face detection (FD) is widely used in interactive user interfaces, in advertising industry, entertainment services, video coding, is necessary first stage for all face recognition systems, etc. However, the last practical and independent comparisons of FD algorithms were made by Hjelmas et al. and by Yang et al. in 2001. The aim of this work is to propose parameters of FD algorithms quality evaluation and methodology of their objective comparison, and to show the current state of the art in face detection. The main idea is routine test of the FD algorithm in the labeled image datasets. Faces are represented by coordinates of the centers of the eyes in these datasets. For algorithms, representing detected faces by rectangles, the statistical model of eyes' coordinates estimation was proposed. In this work the seven face detection algorithms were tested; article contains the results of their comparison.