Finding faces in photographs

Two new schemes are presented for finding human faces in a photograph. The first scheme approximates the unknown distributions of the face and the face-like manifolds wing higher order statistics (HOS). An HOS-based data clustering algorithm is also proposed. In the second scheme, the face to non-face and non-face to face transitions are learnt using a hidden Markov model (HMM). The HMM parameters are estimated corresponding to a given photograph and the faces are located by examining the optimal state sequence of the HMM. Experimental results are presented on the performance of both the schemes.