The human face is an object that is easily located in complex scenes by infants and adults alike. Yet the development of an automated system to perform this task is extremely challenging. An attempt to solve this problem raises two important issues in object location. First, natural objects such as human faces tend to have boundaries which are not exactly described by analytical functions. Second, the object of interest (face) could occur in a scene in various sizes, thus requiring the use of scale independent techniques which can detect instances of the object at all scales.

Although, the task of identifying a well-framed face (as one of a set of labeled faces) has been well researched, the task of locating a face in a natural scene is relatively unexplored. We present a computational theory for locating human faces in scenes with certain constraints. The theory will be validated by experiments confined to instances where people's faces are the primary subject of the scene, occlusion is minimal, and the faces contrast well against the background.