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The face detector won't do anything unless something is subscribing to its output on face_detector/people_tracker_measurements or face_detector/faces_cloud, and if no faces are detected, no messages will be published (rather than publishing messages with zero faces in them). Additionally, /face_detector/status is part of the action interface, so I wouldn't trust anything published on that topic when running in continuous mode.

Edit: More suggestions Check to make sure face_detector is subscribing to the topics your camera is producing. Take a look at the output of rosnode info /face_detector. In the subscriptions section, you should see something like

Subscriptions: 
 * /camera/depth_registered/image_rect [sensor_msgs/Image]
 * /tf [tf/tfMessage]
 * /camera/rgb/image_rect [sensor_msgs/Image]
 * /camera/rgb/camera_info [sensor_msgs/CameraInfo]
 * /camera/depth_registered/camera_info [sensor_msgs/CameraInfo]

If any of the topics say [unknown type] next to them, then the subscription isn't working (possibly due to the topic being wrong). If you see any of those, check to see what topic data is actually being produced on.