Robust real-time eye detection and tracking under variable lighting conditions and various face orientations

  • Authors:
  • Zhiwei Zhu;Qiang Ji

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute JEC 6219, Troy, NY;Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute JEC 6044, Troy, NY

  • Venue:
  • Computer Vision and Image Understanding - Special issue on eye detection and tracking
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Most eye trackers based on active IR illumination require distinctive bright pupil effect to work well. However, due to a variety of factors such as eye closure, eye occlusion, and external illumination interference, pupils are not bright enough for these methods to work well. This tends to significantly limit their scope of application. In this paper, we present an integrated eye tracker to overcome these limitations. By combining the latest technologies in appearance-based object recognition and tracking with active IR illumination, our eye tracker can robustly track eyes under variable and realistic lighting conditions and under various face orientations. In addition, our integrated eye tracker is able to handle occlusion, glasses, and to simultaneously track multiple people with different distances and poses to the camera. Results from an extensive experiment shows a significant improvement of our technique over existing eye tracking techniques.