PURPOSE: To extract nostrils and eyes at high speed without being affected by attached information by converting eye candidates to data, having plural luminance values inside eye areas, and determining the eyes and positions thereof within the extracted candidates. CONSTITUTION: A CPU reads the image data of a face image, outputted from a CCD camera from an image memory for storing the image data of the face image and inputs these data to a face image input means 4, an area, where the existence of eyes is estimated, is estimated by an eye area setting means 5, and the eye candidates are extracted by performing luminance conversion in an eye candidate extracting means 6. In this case, data on which luminance conversion is applied, are preserved in a memory different from that of input images, so that the input image data can be referred to later as well. Furthermore, eye candidates and eye positions are determined from the extracted area by an eye determining means 7. Additionally, the eye positions determined by the eye determining means 7 are preserved in the memory and are used for setting eye areas at the time of eye tracking mode.
2 FACE IMAGE PROCESSING APPARATUS EMPLOYING TWO-DIMENSIONAL TEMPLATE