A color based approach for eye blink detection in image sequences

The human eye gives a clue about the mental state in the context of various applications such as stress, confusion and drowsiness. In this work we present a new algorithm for eye blink detection, by employing color information of the surrounding eye region. Moreover it is capable to detect eye blinks as well as relative eye lid movement. The algorithm handles decent rotations of the head, as long the eye is reliably detectable. Our approach is efficient though quite simple, since no segmentation of discrete eye features like lids or iris are required. The results show good performance on non-acted, real Human-Computer-Interaction videos, where subjects are allowed to behave randomly. Further, we compare our results to state of art methods.