This paper presents a face detection technique and its applications in image retrieval. Even though this face detection method has relatively high false positives and low detection rate as compared with the dedicated face detection systems in the literature of image understanding, due to its simple and fast nature, it has been shown that this system may be well applied in image retrieval in certain focused application domains. Two application examples are given: one combining face detection with indexed collateral text for image retrieval regarding human beings, and the other combining face detection with conventional similarity matching techniques for image retrieval with similar background. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches have signi cantly improved the image retrieval precisions than the existing search engines in these focused application domains. Key Words: Face Detection, Image Retrieval, Collateral Text, Similarity Matching, Focused Domain.
Zhongfei Zhang, Rohini K. Srihari, Aibing Rao