Detecting Pupil and Corneal Reflection under Intense Illumination

Abstract

The movement of the pupils and corneal reflections from the video camera images that capture the entire human face is very important to develop systems for precisely and remotely detecting eye-gaze. However, doing this was difficult under intense illumination when using the conventional method because the pupil becomes small. This decreases the brightness of the pupil brightness. In our method, bright and dark pupil images and their corresponding non-lighting images are consecutively obtained while turning two light sources on and off. Using the divided and multiplied images of the bright and dark pupil images differentiated by the non-lighting images enables the pupil and corneal reflection, as well as the face, to be detected more sensitively. This means that a detection with no defects around the eyes can be extracted. The proposed methods showed better experimental results under the intense illumination than the conventional method did.