Head-pose invariant eyelid and iris tracking method

These days, there is more demand of camera based gaze estimation method for a new interface and a new marketing measurement tool. Considering these applications, the system should track a new user without any operation like calibrations. It also admits user's natural head pose changes. Previous methods, however, need calibration procedure before execution and have less accuracy under head moving situation. In this paper, we propose the method which tracks user's eyelid and iris automatically and accurately. Our method is the pretreatment of gaze estimation without any calibration and head pose restraint. First of all we track the facial feature points from an input face image and estimate its head pose, extracting eye region image. On the eye region image, we track eyelid shape based on the eyelid shape model generated beforehand from PCA. Finally we track iris inside the eyelid based on the eye ball model. These eyelid and iris tracking are processed by Particle Filter. From the evaluation of database including head pose changes, we confirmed that accuracy of the eyelid and iris tracking is improved compared with previous methods.