A human must periodically blink to keep his eyes moist. Blinking is involuntary and fast. Most people do not notice when the blink. However, detecting a blinking pattern in an image sequence is an easy and reliable means to detect the presence of a face. Blinking provides a space-time signal which is easily detected and unique to faces. The fact that both eyes blink together provides a rundandance which permits blinking to be discriminated from other motions in the scene. The fact that the eyes are symmetrically positioned with a fixed separation provides a means to normalize the size and orientation of the head.
We have built a simple blink detector which works as follows: As each image is acquired, the previous image is subtracted. The resulting difference image generally contains a small boundary region around the outside of the head. If the eyes happened to be closed in one of the two images, there are also two small roundish regions over the eyes where the difference is significant.
The difference image is thresholded, and a connected components algorithm is run on the thresholded image. A bounding box is computed for each connected components. A candidate for an eye must have a bounding box within a particular horizontal and vertical size. Two such candidates must be detected with a horizontal separation of a certain range of sizes, and little vertical difference in the vertical separation. When this configuration of two small bounding boxes is detected, a pair of blinking eyes is hypothesized. The position in the image is determined from the center of the line between the bounding boxes. The distance to the face is measured from the separation. This permits to determine the size of a window which is used to extract the face from the image. This simple technique has proven quite reliable for determining the position and size of faces.
Figure 6: Every 5th image from a sequence of 70 images of Jerome Martin
turning.