facedetect: a simple face detector for batch processing

facedetect is a simple face detector for batch processing. It answers the basic question: "Is there a face in this image?" and gives back either an exit code or the coordinates of each detected face in the standard output.

The aim is to provide a basic command-line interface that's consistent and easy to use with software such as ImageMagick, while progressively improving the detection algorithm over time.

facedetect is currently used in fgallery to improve the thumbnail cutting region, so that faces are always centered.

Usage

By default facedetect outputs the rectangles of all the detected faces:

./facedetect path/to/image.jpg
289 139 56 56
295 283 55 55

The output values are the X Y coordinates (from the top-left corner), followed by width and height. For debugging, you can examine the face positions directly overlaid on the source image using the -o flag:

./facedetect -o test.jpg path/to/image.jpg

To simply check if an image contains a face, use the -q switch and check the exit status:

./facedetect -q path/to/image.jpg
echo $?

An exit status of 0 indicates the presence of at least one face. An exit status of 2 means that no face could be detected (1 is reserved for failures).

The --center flag also exists for scripting convenience, and simply outputs the X Y coordinates of face centers:

./facedetect --center path/to/image.jpg
317 167
322 310

The --biggest flag only outputs the biggest face in the image, while --best will attempt to select the face in focus and/or in the center of the frame.

Comparison between --best (top) and --biggest (bottom). The actual chosen face is highlighted in yellow.

Unless DOF or motion blur is used effectively by the photographer to separate the subject, --biggest would in most cases select the same face as --best, while being significantly faster to compute.

Examples

Sorting images with and without faces

The following example sorts pictures into two different "landscape" and "portrait" directories using the exit code:

for file in path/to/pictures/*.jpg; do
  name=$(basename "$file")
  if facedetect -q "$file"; then
    mv "$file" "path/to/portrait/$name"
  else
    mv "$file" "path/to/landscape/$name"
  fi
done

Blurring faces within an image

The following example uses the coordinates from facedetect to pixelate the faces in all the source images using mogrify (from ImageMagick):

for file in path/to/pictures/*.jpg; do
  name=$(basename "$file")
  out="path/to/blurred/$name"
  cp "$file" "$out"
  facedetect "$file" | while read x y w h; do
    mogrify -gravity NorthWest -region "${w}x${h}+${x}+${y}" \
      -scale '10%' -scale '1000%' "$out"
  done
done

Here mogrify is called for each output line of facedetect (which is sub-optimal), modifying the file in-place.

Dependencies

The following software is currently required for facedetect:

Python
Python OpenCV (python-opencv)
OpenCV data files (opencv-data if available, or libopencv-dev)

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can install all the required dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install python python-opencv libopencv-dev

and then install facedetect with:

sudo cp facedetect /usr/local/bin

Development status and ideas

Currently facedetect is not much beyond a simple wrapper over the Haar Cascade classifier of OpenCV and the frontalface_alt2 profile, which provided the best results in terms of accuracy/detection rate for the general, real life photos at my disposal.

In terms of speed, the LBP classifier was faster. But while the general theory states that it should also be more accurate, the lbp_frontalface profile didn't provide comparable results, suggesting that additional training is necessary. If some training dataset is found though, creating an LBP profile would probably be a better solution especially for the processing speed.

haar_profileface had too many false positives in my tests to be usable. Using it in combination with haar_eye (and other face parts) though, to reduce the false positive rates and/or rank the regions, might be a very good solution instead.

Both LBP and Haar don't play too well with rotated faces. This is particularly evident with "artistic" portraits shot at an angle. Pre-rotating the image using the information from a Hough transform might boost the detection rate in many cases, and should be relatively straightforward to implement.

Authors and Copyright

facedetect can be found at http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/facedetect/

facedetect is distributed under GPL2 (see COPYING) WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

facedetect's GIT repository is publicly accessible at:

git://src.thregr.org/facedetect

or at GitHub.

patrickhult / facedetect