We present an efficient and reliable algorithm to detect human faces in an image under different lighting conditions. In our algorithm, skin-colored pixels are identified using a region-based approach, which can provide more reliable skin color segmentation under various lighting conditions. In addition, to compensate for extreme lighting conditions, a color compensation scheme is proposed, and the distributions of the skin-color components under various illuminations are modeled by means of the maximum-likelihood method. With the skin-color regions detected, a ratio method is proposed to determine the possible positions of the eyes in the image. Two eye candidates form a possible face region, which is then verified as a face or not by means of a two-stage procedure with an eigenmask. Finally, the face boundary region of a face candidate is further verified by a probabilistic approach to reduce the chance of false alarms. Experimental results based on the HHI MPEG-7 face database, the AR face database, and the CMU pose, illumination, and expression (PIE) database show that this face detection algorithm is efficient and reliable under different lighting conditions and facial expressions.
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