Real-time iris detection on faces with coronal axis rotation

Real-time face and iris detection on video sequences is important in diverse applications such as, study of the eye function, drowsiness detection, virtual keyboard interfaces, face recognition and multimedia retrieval. In previous work we developed a non-invasive real time iris detection method consisting of three stages: coarse face detection, fine face detection and iris boundary detection. In this paper, iris detection is considered on faces with rotations in the coronal axis within the range -40° to 40°. It is shown that a line integral over the directional image as a function of the template rotation, has a maximum when the face and template coincide in rotation angle. The method was applied on 10 video sequences, with a total of 6470 frames, from different subjects rotating their faces in the coronal axis. Results of correct face detection on 8 video sequences were 100%, one reached 99.9% and one 98.2%. Results on correct iris detection are above 96% in 9 of the video sequences and one reached 77.8%. The method was implemented in real-time (30 frames per second) with a PC 1.8 GHz.