Face detection and initialization

The method for face tracking described thus far has assumed that the facial features in the image are located within a reasonable proximity to the current estimate. Although this assumption is reasonable during tracking, where face motion between frames is often quite small, we are still faced with the dilemma of how to initialize the model in the first frame of the sequence. An obvious choice for this is to use OpenCV's in-built cascade detector to find the face. However, the placement of the model within the detected bounding box will depend on the selection made for the facial features to track. In keeping with the data-driven paradigm we have followed so far in this chapter, a simple solution is to learn the geometrical relationship between the face detection's bounding box and the facial features.

The face_detector class implements exactly this solution. A snippet of its declaration that highlights its functionality is given as follows:

class face_detector...