A method (100) of locating human faces, if present, in a cluttered scene
captured on a digital image (105) is disclosed. The method (100)
relies on a two step process, the first being the detection of segments with a
high probability of being human skin in the color image (105), and to then
determine a bounday box, or other boundary indication, to border each of those
segments. The second step (140) is the analysis of features within each
of those boundary boxes to determine which of the segments are likely to be a human
face. As human skin is not highly textured, in order to detect segments with a
high probability of being human skin, a binary texture map (121) is formed
from the image (105), and segments having high texture are discarded.