Python Data Analysis Cookbook

Detecting faces with Haar cascades

Faces are an identifying feature of human anatomy. Strictly speaking, many animals also have faces, but that is less relevant for most practical applications. Face detection tries to find (rectangular) areas in an image that represent faces. Face detection is a type of object detection, because faces are a type of object.

Most face detection algorithms are good at detecting clean fron-facing faces because most training images fall in that category. Tilted faces, bright lights, or noisy images may cause problems for face detection. It is possible to deduce age, gender, or ethnicity (for instance, the presence of epicanthic folds) from a face, which of course is useful for marketing.

A possible application could ...