Facial feature detection by saccadic exploration of the Gabor decomposition

The Gabor decomposition is a ubiquitous tool in computer vision. Nevertheless, it is generally considered computationally demanding for active vision applications. We suggest an attention-driven approach to feature detection inspired by the human saccadic system. A dramatic speedup is achieved by computing the Gabor decomposition only on the points of a sparse retinotopic grid. An application to eye detection is presented. Also, a real-time head detection and tracking system based on our approach is briefly discussed. The system features a novel eyeball-mounted camera designed to mimic the dynamic performance of the human eye and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first example of active vision system based on the Gabor decomposition.