Computer Vision for the Blind: A Comparison of Face Detectors in a Relevant Scenario

Motivated by the aim of developing a vision-based system to assist the social interaction of blind persons, the performance of some face detectors are evaluated. The detectors are applied to manually annotated video sequences acquired by blind persons with a glass-mounted camera and a necklace-mounted one. The sequences are relevant to the specific application and demonstrate to be challenging for all the considered detectors. A further analysis is performed to reveal how the performance is affected by some features such as occlusion, rotations, size and position of the face within the frame.