Involuntary-blink detection method robust against dynamically change of frame rate

This paper proposes a robust method to detect involuntary blinks for visual display terminal (VDT) users using Web camera, even if the Web-camera's frame rate dynamically changes and becomes slow. Conventional methods which are widely used for drivers and paralyzed person with higher-performance camera, calculates correlation between an open eye template and cureent eye image at each frame, and judge the blink to have occurred when the correlation score falled below a pre-defined threshold value. In our proposal aimed to use for Web camera build-in personal devices and widely used inexpensive Web camera for the threshold value is dynamically controlled according to varying frame rate and effective value of the correlation score. We implemented a blink detection system into laptop PC with build-in Web camera. The experimental result show that the proposed method imporved blink detection accuracy at low frame rate.