is specialized in searching for facial features (eyes
nose
mouth
ears
etc) within a given region in an image or image sequence. It finds applications in various areas
such as face detection
face recognition
gesture recognition
expression recognition
face image compression and reconstruction
face cartoon
etc. This paper attempts to give an overview of the latest development in this field by classifying the newly proposed methods into five categories
namely the ones based on knowledge
geometry information
color
appearance and relative location. All these methods appeared in related papers or works published on international
as well as Chinese
journals and conferences in recent years. Then their performances in accurate rate
robustness and computational expense are roughly estimated and compared while some discussions about the criteria on which the estimation and comparison bases are provided. At the end of this paper
a prospect of the future development in this field is presented based on the observation of how an effective face feature location system should be build.