Get full access to Mastering OpenCV 4 - Third Edition and 60K+ other titles, with a free 10-day trial of O'Reilly.

There are also live events, courses curated by job role, and more.

Implementing face detection using OpenCV cascade classifiers

As mentioned previously, OpenCV v2.4 comes with various pretrained XML detectors that you can use for different purposes. The following table lists some of the most popular XML files:

Type of cascade classifier	XML filename
Face detector (default)	`haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml`
Face detector (fast Haar)	`haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml`
Face detector (fast LBP)	`lbpcascade_frontalface.xml`
Profile (side-looking) face detector	`haarcascade_profileface.xml`
Eye detector (separate for left and right)	`haarcascade_lefteye_2splits.xml`
Mouth detector	`haarcascade_mcs_mouth.xml`
Nose detector	`haarcascade_mcs_nose.xml`
Whole person detector	`haarcascade_fullbody.xml`

Get Mastering OpenCV 4 - Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Don’t leave empty-handed

Get Mark Richards’s Software Architecture Patterns ebook to better understand how to design components—and how they should interact.

It’s yours, free.

Get it now

Check it out now on O’Reilly

Dive in for free with a 10-day trial of the O’Reilly learning platform—then explore all the other resources our members count on to build skills and solve problems every day.

Start your free trial Become a member now