A feature based face recognition method and apparatus. Global amplitude and direction is calculated for regions defined by a sliding window over an input gray scale image. These values are low pass filtered and a search is carried out for candidates for an eye. Once an eye candidate is identified by comparing the amplitude with a threshold, the other eye is presumed to be located a fixed distance away at the angle of the eye. The mouth is then determined to be in a predetermined location perpendicular to the angle of the eyes. A face contour is estimated by defining two ellipses between which face contours having angles similar to the ellipse are found. Multiple detections are possible and those detections are merged by averaging. The image is resized and the process repeats until the image has been reduced to its minimum size.
Face detection under varying rotation