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frontal or profile ones and could have varying align-
ments from straight to oblique ones.
Our developed system is based on parametric ac-
tive contours whose innovative automatic initializa-
tion is based on the set of downscaled images and ap-
plies new validation criteria involving skin color and
area information. The evolution of these active con-
tours is guided by the multi-scale, multi-feature vec-
tor flow mechanism which uses the original combi-
nation of edges and regions extracted from the multi-
scale representations of the processed color image.
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