Revision history [back]

if you really want to stick with the cascades, at least use the frontalface_improved_lbp one, which has several rounds of hard negative mining and is thus way more robust than the out of the box haarcascade model. As stated by everyone, you will always have false detections (face rectangles where there is no face). Those are almost completely gone in the improved model. How we got there can be read here.