Face Detection System Based On MLP Neural Network

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
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Face Detection System Based on MLP

Neural Network
Nidal F. Shilbayeh and Gaith A. Al-Qudah
Abstract—Face detection is the problem of determining whether there are human faces in the image and tries to make a
judgment on whether or not that image contains a face. In this paper, we propose a face detector using an efficient architecture
based on a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network and Maximal Rejection Classifier (MRC). The proposed approach
significantly improves the efficiency and the accuracy of detection in comparison with the traditional neural-network techniques.
In order to reduce the total computation cost, we organize the neural network in a pre-stage that is able to reject a majority of
non-face patterns in the image backgrounds, thereby significantly improving the overall detection efficiency while maintaining
the detection accuracy. An important advantage of the new architecture is that it has a homogeneous structure so that it is
suitable for very efficient implementation using programmable devices. Comparisons with other state-of-the-art face detection
systems are presented. Our proposed approach achieves one of the best detection accuracies with significantly reduced
training and detection cost.
Index Terms— Face Detection, Neural Network, MLP Neural Network, Training, Learning, MRC.
——————————  ——————————
1 INTRODUCTION
N owadays, there is an increasing trend of using bio-

metrics information, which refers to the human bio-
logical features used for user authentication, such as

ferently due to changes in lighting.
Facial Expressions: the appearance of faces is directly
affected by a person’s facial expression.
fingerprint, iris, and face. Face detection is becoming one  Presence or absence of structural components: facial
of the most active research areas in computer vision and a features such as beards, mustaches, and glasses may
very important research topic in biometrics; due to its or may not be present and there is a great deal of va-
wide range of possible applications, like security access riability among these components including shape,
control, video surveillance and image database manage- color, and size.
ment, and it is the first step in any face recognition Sys-  Occlusion: faces may be partially occluded by other
tem. objects. In an image with a group of people, some
faces may partially occlude other faces.
Face detection is the problem of determining whether  Image Orientation: face images directly vary for dif-
there are human faces in the image and tries to make a ferent rotations about the axis.
judgment on whether or not that image contains a face.  Image Conditions: when the image is formed, varia-
Given an image, face detection involves localizing all fac- tions such as lighting and camera characteristics af-
es - if any - in this image. It is the first step in any auto- fect the appearance of a face.
mated system that solves problems such as: face recogni-
tion, face tracking and facial expression recognition. Reviewing the literature, it is quite difficult to state that
there exists a complete system which solves face detection
Variations in images increase the complexity of the deci- problem with all variations included. Neural networks
sion boundary between face and non-face classes. Such have shown very good results for detecting a certain pat-
complexity will also increase the difficulty of the problem tern in a given image [1, 2, 11,13,14,15,17]. But the prob-
and make the classification to be harder. These variations lem with neural networks is that the computational com-
can be summarized as follows [3, 9]: plexity is very high because the networks have to process
 Pose: the image of face varies due to the relative face many small local windows in the images [2, 5]. Some au-
pose (frontal, 45 degree, profile, upside down), and thors tried to speed up the detection process of neural
some facial features such as eye or the nose may be- networks [12, 14, 15, 18]. They proposed a multilayer per-
come partially or wholly occluded ceptron (MLP) algorithm for fast object/face detection.
 Illumination: same face, with the same facial expres- They claimed that applying cross-correlation in the fre-
sion, and seen from the same viewpoint appears dif- quency domain between the input image and the neural
weights is much faster than using conventional neural
———————————————— networks. They stated this without any conditions and
 Nidal F. Shilbayeh is with the Middle East University, Amman, Jordan. introduced formulas for the number of computation steps
 Gaith AlQudahS is with the Princess Sumaya University for Technology, needed by conventional neural networks and their pro-
Amman, Jordan. posed fast neural networks.
The main objective of this thesis is to design and imple-

ment face detection system that locate upright frontal  Preprocessing.
faces on digital color images with high detection rate.  Facial features extraction
Also, the system able to detect faces of various sizes in
complex background images. We proposed a new me-
thod for improving the detection rate through the use of
cascade classifier. The elegant key behind the cascade is
based on a tree structure of classifiers. In detection task in
a large image a large majority of the sub-windows ob-
served by scanning the image using the MRC classifier
will be rejected and just a small regional area(s) in the Fig.2 Cascading MRC and NN Diagram
image might be target(s). Therefore, the generality of the
first stage must be sufficiently high to reduce the number In Image enhancement stage, an input image is passed to
of these false positive sub-windows from processing in
the system for classification. Image varies in format, size,
the next stage using MLP neural network. The aim of cas-
cading is to provide inference with the lowest possible and resolution. The histogram equalization is performed
false positives, and highest detection rate. to enhance the contrast in the image. It compensates
changes in illumination in different images. Histogram
2 DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM equalization equitably spreads the pixels of an image
among the grey‐level intensities thereby increasing the
The system is implemented using MATLAB 7.0 and visu-
al studio NET and window size 20*20[10]. The proposed contrast of the image.
face detection system is based on using the MRC tech-
nique [8] cascaded with the MLP neural network tech- In preprocessing stage, the two classes both “non‐faces”
nique [16] to achieve better detection rate. The reason of and “faces” were first subjected to the process of resizing
choosing MRC cascaded with MLP Neural Network is by 20x20 as example and the size will considered to give
that the MRC is fast, easy to implement, very accurate
us the best detection in the following stages. So each im‐
classifier. The neural network used in this system is mul-
ti-layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks. age in the “non‐face” and “face” class was first resize to
20x20 sizes. Then with the use of standard histogram
Fig.1 shows our cascaded system. The proposed system equalization algorithm each image of both “non‐face” and
consists of 3 stages “face” classes were histogram equalized in order to cor‐
1. The preprocessing stage: receives as input a 20 * 20 rect brightness, contrast and equalize the different intensi‐
pixel region of the image and generates an output
ties level of the image. After the histogram equalization,
ranging from 1 to -1, signifying the presence or ab-
sence of a face, respectively. the technique of gray scale is applied on the images of
2. MRC stage: receives the window resulted from part 1 both the classes in order to convert their color levels (i.e.
after preprocessing to reject the non-faces. RGB) to gray level.

MLP neural network stage: receives the expected faces Facial feature extraction stage, 20x20 sized small images
window from stage 2 and pass it to the MLP neural net-
are extracted from the reduced sized image and fed to the
work to decide whether the window contains face or not.
maximal rejection classifier (MRC) and then the target we
do some operations using the MRC and pass the target
section to the neural network. In face detection, Majority
of the proposed methods use image gray level values to
detect faces in spite of the fact that most images today are
color to solve these problems, our approach will deal with
face detection methods in a color image.

After we do the preprocessing stage on the image we pass
it to the MRC network, the classifier (MRC) is used to
explore face candidate locations and try to filter as many
Fig.1 Cascading MRC and NN non‐face patterns as possible before passing hard patterns
to the final stage classifier; it means false rejection must be
2.1 Cascading MRC and NN avoided at any cost. Because of the property of MRC, we
Before fed the input image to the system as we see in can avoid false rejection as long as we give MRC the
fig.2, our face detection system does the following stages: enough training data in learning stage. In other words,
 Image enhancement the training set must be ideally and identically distributed
in the sample space. finding faces. As shown in fig.3.

The last stage classifier is the MLP neural network clas‐
sifier that has been used extensively in classification and
regression. The expected face window resulted from the
MRC classifier passed to the MLP classifier to decide
whether the window contains a face. The employed mul‐
tilayer feed forward neural network consists of neurons

with a sigmoid activation function. It is used in two mod‐ Fig. 3 Maximal Rejection Classifier ʺ1ʺ
es. In classification mode, it is presented at the input layer After that we take only the remaining non‐face part in the
and propagated forward through the network to compute dark green and finding theta two, it means that we must
the activation value for each output neuron. The second find another theta and two decision levels that the num‐
mode is called the training or learning mode. Learning in ber of rejected non‐faces is maximized while finding faces
ANN involves the adjustment of the weights in order to as shown in fig.4.
achieve the desired processing for a set of learning face
samples. More specifically, the second mode includes
feeding a neural network with a number of training pairs.
Then the networks parameters are adjusted through a
supervised training algorithm.

2.2 MRC Face Detection
The Maximal Rejection Classifier (MRC) is a linear clas‐

sifier that overcomes the two drawbacks. While maintain‐
Fig.4 Maximal Rejection Classifier ʺ2ʺ
ing the simplicity of a linear classifier, it can also deal

with non‐linearly separable cases. The only requirement
The first stage in the MRC is to gather two example‐sets,
is that the Clutter class and the Target class are disjoint.
Faces and Non‐Faces. Large enough sets are needed in
MRC is an iterative rejection based classification algo‐
order to guarantee good generalization for the faces and
rithm. The main idea is to apply a linear projection fol‐
the non‐faces that may be encountered in images.
lowed by a threshold (in each iteration). However, as op‐

posed to these two methods, the projection vector and the
The target class should be assumed to be convex in order
corresponding thresholds are chosen such that at each
for the MRC to perform well. The target class containing
iteration. MRC attempts to maximize the number of re‐
frontal faces. One can easily imagine two faces that are
jected Clutter samples. This means that after the first clas‐
not perfectly aligned, and therefore, when averaged,
sification iteration, many of the Clutter samples are al‐
create a new block with possibly four eyes, or a nose and
ready classified as such, and discarded from further con‐
its echo, etc. To our help comes the fact that we are using
sideration. The process is continued with the remaining
low‐ resolution representation of the faces (20 * 20 pix‐
Clutter samples, again searching for a linear projection
els).This implies that even for such misaligned faces ,the
vector and thresholds that maximizes the rejection of
convex average appear as a face, and thus our assumption
Clutter points from the remaining set. This process is re‐
regarding convexity of the faces class is valid. The Non‐
peated iteratively until convergence to zero or a small
Face set is required to be much larger, in order to
number of Clutter points. The remaining samples at the
represent the variability of Non‐Face patterns in images.
final stage are considered as targets.

2.2.1Rejection on MRC
Now, that we have segmented every image into several The rejection in MRC is as follow:
segments and approximated every segment with a small  Build a combination of classifiers: we must find theta
number of representative pixels, we can exhaustively and two decision levels that the number of rejected
search for the best combination of segments that will re‐ non‐faces is maximized while finding faces.
ject the largest number of non‐face images. We repeat this  Apply the weak classifiers sequentially while reject‐
process until the improvement in rejection is negligible. It ing non‐faces: it means that we must find another
means that we must find theta and two decision levels theta and two decision levels that the number of re‐
that the number of rejected non‐faces is maximized while jected non‐faces is maximized while finding faces as
shown in the fig.5. system is included detailing the operation of the detector.

Fig.5 Maximal Rejection Classifier All Stages.

2.3 The MLP neural network classifier
Fig.6 The MLP Network
Fig.6 shows the MLP neural network implemented in our
face detection system. It is composed of 3 layers, one in‐
put, one hidden and one output. The input layer consti‐ 3 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
tutes of 400 neurons (20*20) which receive pixel binary The face detection system presented in this paper was
data from a 20x20 symbol pixel matrix. The size of this developed, trained, and tested using MATLAB™ 7.0, vis-
matrix was decided taking into consideration the average ual studio .NET 2003 on the Intel Pentium (4) 3.20 GHz
1.00GB of RAM and Windows XP operating system.
height and width of character image that can be mapped
We divide our system into two parts; first is training and
without introducing any significant pixel noise. second is testing.

The hidden layer constitutes of 300 neurons whose num‐ Training: Each stage in the cascade was trained using a
ber is decided on the basis of optimal results on a trial positive set, a negative set. In order to train the Face De-
and error basis. The output layer is 1 neuron. To initialize tection System to figure out the face and non-face images.
We need to pass a collect (bunch) of face and non-face
the weights a random function was used to assign an ini‐
training data to give out 1 for face and -1 for non-face.
tial random number which lies between two preset integ‐ Initially our face training set contains face images col-
ers named bias. The weight bias is selected from trial and lected from MIT face databases. Our face detection system
error observation to correspond to average weights for has been applied to several test images (faces were fron-
quick convergence. tal). All images were scaled to 20x20 pixels, and satisfac-
tory results have been obtained. The test set consists of a
total of 2000 face and non-face images given in the MIT
After the image data enters the input node, it is calculated
database. Non-face patterns are generated at different
by the weights. Face or non‐face data is determined by locations and scales from images with various subjects,
comparing output results with the thresholds. For exam‐ such as rocks, trees, buildings, and flowers, which contain
ple, if the output is larger than the threshold, it is consi‐ no faces.
dered as a face data.
For the training images, because of the lighting, shadow,

contract variances, we need to equalize those differences.
A problem that arises with window scanning techniques The linear fit function will approximate the overall
is overlapping detections. Deals with this problem brightness of each part of the window.
through two heuristics: To train the cascade of classifiers of the rejection stage to
 Thresholding: the number of detections in a small detect frontal upright faces, the same face and non-face
region surrounding the current location is counted, patterns are used for all stages. The neural net is trained
for 191 epochs as shown in fig.7.
and if it is above a certain threshold, a face is present
at this location.
 Overlap elimination: when a region is classified as a
face according to thresholding, then overlapping de‐
tections are likely to be false positives and thus are re‐
jected.

Windows thought to contain a face are outlined with a
bounding box and on completion a copy of the image is
displayed, indicating the locations of any faces detected.
In the next section a more thorough description of the Fig.7 Trained Epochs.
System Testing: Firstly, we compare the first classifier Table1 MRC Testing Results
learned using MRC algorithm on three images; secondly Image Detection Average False False
we compare those images on the all stages on our system. # Int. % Time Positive Negative
Finally, we compare our face detection system with oth- 1 92 17 sec. 0 2
ers. 2 100 34 sec. 0 0
This experiment compares single strong classifier learned Table 2: MRC-MLP Testing Results
using MRC algorithm in the classification performance.
The database consists of two images as shown in fig.8.
Image Detection Average False False
The first image contains 8 frontal faces and the second
# Int. % Time Positive Negative
image contains 11 frontal faces. The system has been
1 100 19 sec. 0 0
tested using the MRC classifier alone. Then, the system
2 100 42 sec. 1 0
has been tested using the MRC-MLP cascaded face detec-
tion system. The images below have complex background
and occlusion faces and it have different shapes and dif-
ferent lighting. 4 COMPARISON AND DISCUSSION
Table 3 shows the comparison of the proposed system
with well-known classifiers used in the literature. This
comparison shows that our system gives good results.
The results shows that the MRC-MLP classifier has detec-
tion rate more than SVM and MLP classifiers and an error
rate (False positive and false negative) less than Adaboost
classifier[6].
Table 3 Comparison with other systems

Fig.8 Test Images
Classifier Detection Error
Fig.9 and table 1 shows the MRC test can detect more Rate Rate
than 90% of faces in all the images and has an average
time 20 seconds. Fig.10 and table 2 shows the result of the Multiple SVM 88.14% 5.86
second test using the cascaded MRC-MLP system was MLP 91.25 8.75
100% detection rate and acceptable average time. As a
result of this test, the proposed system increases the de- AdaBoost 99.78 .22
tection rate. MRC&MLP 91.6 7.54
The results obtained in table 3 as a result of testing our

system in the MIT database. The database test set consists
of a total of 2000 face and non-face images. Non-face pat-
terns are generated at different locations and scales from
images with various subjects, such as rocks, trees, build-
ings, and flowers, which contain no faces. Fig.11 and
fig.12 shows examples from the faces and non-faces train-
Fig.9 Output of the MRC alone ing set respectively.
Fig.11 Faces training set
Fig.10 Output of the MRC-MLP cascaded system

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2010, ISSN 2151-9617

Face Detection System Based on MLP

N owadays, there is an increasing trend of using bio-

The main objective of this thesis is to design and imple-

Table 3 Comparison with other systems

The results obtained in table 3 as a result of testing our

Fig.11 Faces training set

Fig.10 Output of the MRC-MLP cascaded system

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