Tracking iris contour with a 3D eye-model for gaze estimation

Abstract

This paper describes a sophisticated method to track iris contour and to estimate eye gaze for blinking eyes with a monocular camera. A 3D eye-model that consists of eyeballs, iris contours and eyelids is designed that describes the geometrical properties and the movements of eyes. Both the iris contours and the eyelid contours are tracked by using this eye-model and a particle filter. This algorithm is able to detect "pure" iris contours because it can distinguish iris contours from eyelids contours. The eye gaze is described by the movement parameters of the 3D eye model, which are estimated by the particle filter during tracking. Other distinctive features of this algorithm are: 1) it does not require any special light sources (e.g. an infrared illuminator) and 2) it can operate at video rate. Through extensive experiments on real video sequences we confirmed the robustness and the effectiveness of our method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.