A low cost FPGA system for high speed face detection and tracking

We present an FPGA face detection and tracking system for audiovisual communications with a particular focus on mobile videoconferencing. The advantages of deploying such a technology in a mobile handset are many, including face stabilisation, reduced bitrate, and higher quality video on practical display sizes. Most face detection methods, however, assume at least modest general purpose processing capabilities, making them inappropriate for real-time applications, especially for power-limited devices, as well as modest custom hardware implementations. We present a method which achieves a very high detection and tracking performance and, at the same time, entails a significantly reduced computational complexity, allowing real-time implementations on custom hardware or simple microprocessors. We then propose an FPGA implementation which entails very low logic and memory costs and achieves extremely high processing rates at very low clock speeds.