Can you find a face in a HEVC bitstream?

Abstract

Finding faces in images is one of the most important tasks in computer vision, with applications in biometrics, surveillance, human-computer interaction, and other areas. In our earlier work, we demonstrated that it is possible to tell whether or not an image contains a face by only examining the HEVC syntax, without fully reconstructing the image. In the present work we move further in this direction by showing how to localize faces in HEVC-coded images, without full reconstruction. We also demonstrate the benefits that such approach can have in privacy-friendly face localization.