Eye detection in face images for a driver vigilance system

For a driver vigilance system one of the most important problem to solve is the eyes detection. In this paper we propose a new algorithm for eyes detection that uses iris geometrical information for determining in the whole image the region candidate to contain an eye, and then the symmetry for selecting the couple of eyes. The novelty of this work is that the algorithm works on complex images without constraints on the background, skin color segmentation and so on. After the first step a validation algorithm based on a neural classifier has been applied to recognize if the couple of region correspond effectively to eyes or are false positive. Different experiments have been carried out on images of subjects with different eyes colors, some of them wearing glasses. Tests showed robustness with respect to situations such as eyes partially occluded. In particular when applied to images where people have the eyes closed the proposed algorithm correctly reveals the absence of eyes. 1