Face detection has numerous applications in robotics, surveillance systems and human computer interaction (HCI). In the first part of this thesis, a skin detection algorithm is proposed which has a remarkable detection rate. The algorithm first conservatively extracts the initial seed; the points which are related to human skin with high probability. Then other skin pixels are extracted in a multi-step multi-feature diffusion method. In addition, a face detection algorithm is designed which uses the color information of the image in a skin left; MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" dir=rtl align=right Keywords: 1 - Skin detection 2-Face Detection 3- Hardware implementation 4- FPGA