Realtime 3D eye gaze animation using a single RGB camera

Abstract

This paper presents the first realtime 3D eye gaze capture method that simultaneously captures the coordinated movement of 3D eye gaze, head poses and facial expression deformation using a single RGB camera. Our key idea is to complement a realtime 3D facial performance capture system with an efficient 3D eye gaze tracker. We start the process by automatically detecting important 2D facial features for each frame. The detected facial features are then used to reconstruct 3D head poses and large-scale facial deformation using multi-linear expression deformation models. Next, we introduce a novel user-independent classification method for extracting iris and pupil pixels in each frame. We formulate the 3D eye gaze tracker in the Maximum A Posterior (MAP) framework, which sequentially infers the most probable state of 3D eye gaze at each frame. The eye gaze tracker could fail when eye blinking occurs. We further introduce an efficient eye close detector to improve the robustness and accuracy of the eye gaze tracker. We have tested our system on both live video streams and the Internet videos, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness under a variety of uncontrolled lighting conditions and overcoming significant differences of races, genders, shapes, poses and expressions across individuals.