On conversion from color to gray-scale images for face detection

Abstract

The paper presents a study on color to gray image conversion from a novel point of view: face detection. To the best knowledge of the authors, research in such a specific topic has not been conducted before. Our work reveals that the standard NTSC conversion is not optimal for face detection tasks, although it may be the best for use to display pictures on monochrome televisions. It is further found experimentally with two AdaBoost-based face detection systems that the detect rates may vary up to 10% by simply changing the parameters of the RGB to Gray conversion. On the other hand, the change has little influence on the false positive rates. Compared to the standard NTSC conversion, the detect rate with the best found parameter setting is 2.85% and 3.58% higher for the two evaluated face detection systems. Promisingly, the work suggests a new solution to the color to gray conversion. It could be extremely easy to be incorporated into most existing face detection systems for accuracy improvement without introduction of any extra cost in computational complexity.