Robust Face Detection in C/C++ (Haar-like features)

Best solution might be Haar-like features.

Viola and Jones adapted the idea of using Haar wavelets and developed the so called Haar-like features. A Haar-like feature considers adjacent rectangular regions at a specific location in a detection window, sums up the pixel intensities in these regions and calculates the difference between them. This difference is then used to categorize subsections of an image. For example, let us say we have an image database with human faces. It is a common observation that among all faces the region of the eyes is darker than the region of the cheeks. Therefore a common haar feature for face detection is a set of two adjacent rectangles that lie above the eye and the cheek region. The position of these rectangles is defined relative to a detection window that acts like a bounding box to the target object (the face in this case).

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haar-like_features