Real-time iris detection on faces with coronal and transversal axis rotation

Abstract

Real-time face and iris detection on video sequences is important in diverse applications such as, study of the eye function, drowsiness detection, man-machine interfaces, face recognition, security and multimedia retrieval. In this work we present and extension to our previous method to incorporate face and iris detection in faces with coronal and transversal axis rotations in real time. The method is based on anthropometric templates and consists of three stages: coarse face detection, fine face detection and iris detection. In the coarse face detection, a directional image is computed and the contribution of each directional vector is weighted into an accumulator. The highest score in the accumulator is taken as the coarse face position. Then, a high-resolution directional image is computed. Face templates were constructed off-line for face coronal and transversal rotation, using face features such as elliptical shape, location of the eyebrows, nose and lips. A line integral is computed using these templates over the fine directional image to find the actual face location, size and rotation angle. This information provides a region to search for the eyes and the iris boundary is detected within this region by a ratio among to line integrals using a semicircular template. Results computed on five video sequences which include coronal and transversal rotations with over 1900 frames show correct face detection rate above 92% and iris detection rate above 86%.