Detecting and tracking eyes by using their physiological properties, dynamics, and appearance

Reliable detection and tracking of eyes is an important requirement for attentive user interfaces. In this paper, we present a methodology for detecting eyes robustly in indoor environments in real-time. We exploit the physiological properties and appearance of eyes as well as head/eye motion dynamics. Infrared lighting is used to capture the physiological properties of eyes, Kalman trackers are used to model eye/head dynamics, and a probabilistic based appearance model is used to represent eye appearance. By combining three separate modalities, with specific enhancements within each modality, our approach allows eyes to be treated as robust features that can be used for other higher-level processing.