Automatic Multi-Layer Red-Eye Detection

Red-eye is a frequently encountered problem caused by flash reflection bouncing back into the camera from a person´s retina. In this paper, we propose a two-stage automatic red-eye detection method. At the first stage, a series of heuristic filters are used to rapidly remove impossible regions according to constraints on color, smoothness, and size. A multi-layer process is applied at this stage to prevent the influence of surrounding redness of the eye. Moreover, at each layer, the approximate size of pupil can be decided automatically without multi-scaling. At the second stage, an SVM classifier that was trained for eye detection is applied to confirm the remaining candidate regions. Some experimental results on real images show the performance of the propose algorithm.