Robustifying eye center localization by head pose cues

Head pose and eye location estimation are two closely related issues which refer to similar application areas. In recent years, these problems have been studied individually in numerous works in the literature. Previous research shows that cylindrical head models and isophote based schemes provide satisfactory precision in head pose and eye location estimation, respectively. However, the eye locator is not adequate to accurately locate eye in the presence of extreme head poses. Therefore, head pose cues may be suited to enhance the accuracy of eye localization in the presence of severe head poses. In this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed in which the transformation matrix obtained from the head pose is used to normalize the eye regions and, in turn the transformation matrix generated by the found eye location is used to correct the pose estimation procedure. The scheme is designed to (1) enhance the accuracy of eye location estimations in low resolution videos, (2) to extend the operating range of the eye locator and (3) to improve the accuracy and re-initialization capabilities of the pose tracker. From the experimental results it can be derived that the proposed unified scheme improves the accuracy of eye estimations by 16% to 23%. Further, it considerably extends its operating range by more than 15°, by overcoming the problems introduced by extreme head poses. Finally, the accuracy of the head pose tracker is improved by 12% to 24%.