Finding rows of people in group images

Abstract

People are among the most popular subjects in photography, and in many social settings, images of groups of people are captured. People often arrange themselves in a very structured manner in these group images. For example, taller peoplemight stand in a row behind smaller people. This structure is often exploited in captions that sequentially label the individuals in each row. We present an algorithm for automatically finding rows of people in group images. A graph is defined for the image, where each face is a vertex. Energy terms are learned from a training set of images. A minimum cut on this graph defines the rows of people in the image. On our test set, the algorithm achieves perfect results with 67.5% of the images. Detecting rows of people is useful for a number of applications.