Real-time face and iris detection on video sequences is important in diverse applications such as, study of the eye function, drowsiness detection, virtual keyboard interfaces, face recognition, and multimedia retrieval. In this paper, a real-time robust method is developed to detect irises on faces with coronal axis rotation within the normal range of to . The method allows head movements with no restrictions to the background. The method is based on anthropometric templates applied to detect the face and eyes. The templates use key features of the face such as the elliptical shape, and location of the eyebrows, nose, and lips. For iris detection, a template following the iris-sclera boundary shape is used. The method was compared to Maio-Maltoni's and Rowley's methods for face detection on five video sequences (TEST 1). The method was also assessed in an additional set of five video sequences for iris detection (TEST 2). Results of correct face detection in TEST 1 were above 99% in three of the five video sequences. The fourth video sequence reached 97.6% and the third 90.6%. In TEST 2, the iris detection was above 96% in all five video sequences with two above 99.7% and two at 100%. Face size estimation is also above 99.9%. The average processing time of our method was 0.02 s per frame. Thus, the proposed method can process frames at a rate near to 50 frames/s, and therefore, is applicable in real time in a standard personal computer (PC 1.8 GHz).

Real-time iris and face detection on video sequences is important in applications such as study of the eye function, drowsiness detection, man-machine interfaces, face recognition security and multimedia retrieval. In this work, we present a real-time template based method for iris detection in faces with wide coronal (− 40°, + 40°) and transversal (− 45°, + 45°) axis rotations. This method is based on anthropometric templates that were constructed off-line for face coronal and transversal rotation, using face features such as elliptical shape, location of the eyebrows, nose and lips. A line integral is computed using these templates over the fine directional image to find the actual face location, face size and rotation angle. This information provides a region to search for the eyes and the iris boundary is detected. Results computed on five video sequences including coronal and transversal rotations with over 1,700 frames show correct face detection rate of 98.5% and iris detection rate of 94.4%. The method was compared with a “weighting mask method” on two video sequences showing an improved performance. The method was also compared for eye detection to a method using combined binary edge and intensity information in two subsets of the AR face database (63 and 564 images). Different disparity errors were considered and for the smallest error, a 100% correct detection was reached in the AR-63 subset and 99.8% was obtained in the AR-564 subset.